Ayza Adler
by Ali Harkness
Summary: Ayza Adler is the fourteen year old daughter of Irene Adler. And she's got a secret. This is her story after her mother starts working for Moriarty and she's thrust into the dangerous world of the consulting criminal.
1. Death in the Country

I could never seem to get it right. I mean, it was still fun, I didn't want to stop or anything. But his body was literally shaking as he awkwardly tried to put his hand on my back then gave up and just hung both his arms lamely by his sides. And honestly, his mouth was pretty lame too. He wasn't doing anything with it. He was just sort of sitting there with his lips pressed against mine like he'd been turned to stone all of the sudden. And every once in awhile he'd jerk a bit, but I was pretty sure that was reflex. Like when someone's just been shot and their body jerks all strangely. Just the nerves, settling as they die. I pulled away first, getting bored.

Billy Wallington stared back at me, his eyes still closed and lip still puckered. I laughed and he thought it was because I'd enjoyed it, so he laughed too. Me and the red haired freckled boy who'd been my friend for the past two months were sitting in the loft of his barn. There was hay spread all around us and it was getting everywhere. In my sweatshirt, up the side of my trousers where I wished Billy was man enough to put his hands. He'd made sure to promise me as we climbed the ladder half an hour ago that this was where his father stored the fresh hay that hadn't been pissed on by any cows yet. He hadn't known it then, but I'd brought up here to get him to kiss me. And I'd gotten that in about five minunes, however that didn't make him good at it.

"You kiss like an eleven year old," I informed him and his freckled ginger face fell so dramatically that I laughed again, dramatically sprawling myself into the hay so my hair could get covered too and match the rest of me.

"Have you kissed a lot of eleven year olds?" He asked self consciously, rubbing his arm in some obsessive compulsive way I'd observed he did whenever I intimidated him.

"Yeah, loads. When I was nine." I grinned at him, putting a piece of cow piss free hay in my mouth and chewing on the end of it.

"You were kissing when you were nine? Didn't your parents get on your case about that? If I'd been kissing when I was-"

"I've only got a Mum," I cut him off before it got ridiculous. "And no, she doesn't care." I laid on my back, gazing up at the tiny holes the wood left in the barn ceiling. I could hear the rain pouring down outside. We'd ducked into the barn in the first place for that reason. I was hoping it would stop soon cause I was bored of this boy, but had to walk a quarter mile through cow dung fields to get back to the house. I'd be soaked by then.

"I feel like your Mum doesn't care about anything," Billy commented, flopping down beside me. I stared at his body, studying every inch of him in seconds, before he even realized I'd looked his way. He was all arms and legs. He was shorter than me, but only by an inch or two and I could pretend he wasn't when he was sitting down. His hair was tomato red and too long because he thought that made him look cool. But he didn't brush it so it was sticking up at all ends and there was always some type of debris in it. He looked like a farm boy and he dressed and smelt like one too. But he was a boy. The only proper one I could find around here.

Normally my mum and I stayed in cities. Tall, lavish skyscrapers way above everyone else where it was always bright and loud and we had people to get us stuff. But for the last two months, we'd been in the bowels of Surrey at the country house where it was supposedly safe until my mum found a new victim. Victims were what made us safe. And rich and powerful, which were the only things that mattered. Finding Billy Wollington had arrived out of pure boredom. He lived at the run down farm next door and since I couldn't go anywhere- we never stayed in one place long enough for me to go to school- I'd decided Billy could entertain me. But it had taken me two months to get the stupid boy from the most religiously conservative family in the known world to give me a peck on the lips. Well, that was a bit more than a peck. There was saliva exchanged. But my Mum could do it in like two minunes, I'd watched it a hundred times when I was supposed to be asleep or not in the room. Maybe fourteen year old boys were harder than grown men. Grown men weren't scared.

"If I looked at a girl when I was nine, my mum threatened to give me the paddle," Billy informed me in his northern accent which was the only thing appealing about him.

"Yeah, cause your mum is normal. Mine's not," I told simply. I wished the rain would stop so I could go home. I'd had to go out in the first place because my mum was meeting with new clients that were supposed to help us find other clients that would then get us out of the stupid country. She didn't like me in the house while she was doing business stuff- which was almost always- because I was 'bad or her image.' Apparently, having a teenager was not appealing to the people she was trying to get in her bed.

"You mean hot," Billy grinned. It looked all wrong when he got a mischievous glint in his eye. Like God was going to smite him at any moment. Or his crazy mum would climb down from the rafters like a spider with her paddle.

"Yeah, that too," I said casually, playing with the piece of hay I'd had in my mouth. "But I'm hotter, right?"

"Well, you're younger-" I rolled over so I was facing him and in perfect position to pounce.

"I'm hotter, right?" I repeated threateningly.

"Yeah, yeah, you're way hotter," he said instantly. Smart boy. I pushed myself up on my elbows and wiped some of the hay out of my ink curls. That's what my mum had always called them. The black, inky Ayza curls.

"I need to teach you how to kiss Billy." His little boy face dropped again. "Before you move on to year ten, I mean. Because that's when girls start getting boobs."

"You've got boobs," Billy frowned. "And you're only in year eight." He took all of this very seriously. He wasn't smart, so he couldn't pick up on the teasing tone in my voice. But that was good, I liked playing with him. And I wasn't in year eight because I didn't go to school. It was boring, I knew all the answers.

"I'll be fourteen in two weeks. And I've got boobs because I'm not like other girls," I told him like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "I never went to normal school, so I aged differently. Here." I took his pale hands and put them on the belt of my jeans. Billy stared at his own appendages like they were no longer a part of his body. "We have to actually touch for this to work," I reminded him patiently. "And you've got to look in my eyes. Girls like that." Billy stared at me, a fly caught in a web.

"Now first, tell me I'm pretty or something."

"You're- you're beautiful," he stuttered. His face was flushing as red as his hair. I took off the cheap plastic heart locket I was wearing and put it in one of his hands after I unclenched his fingers from my belt.

"Hold this. It'll get in the way. Remember that, if a girl is wearing a necklace, it will get all tangled in your hands and stuff and that ruins the mood. Now lean in slow. And you have to do this part cause you're the guy. So you're in control right?" I was doing my best to not laugh. No man had ever been in control of my mum. That's why she was good at her job. But Billy didn't need to know about that. He was too innocent.

"Tilt your head a bit," I advised. He moved it so much, so I reached up and readjusted it like he was my doll. "Now close your eyes." He did. "And press your lips gently against mine." This kiss was a bit better. He didn't go all stiff like he had before. I gently started to move mouth against his so that he'd move too. We kissed softly for about a minute until I got bored and started to actually kiss him for real and nudge my tongue against his mouth. But the weather had another idea. An extremely loud crash of thunder shook the entire barn and Billy jumped a foot in the air as the lightning illuminated his freckles and I realized how dark it had gotten.

"I'd uh- I'd better go in," he mumbled. I wrinkled my noisy cutely, but he was done with my charms. "You can stay for dinner if you want, I'm sure my mum won't mind," he said shily. "She likes you." All adults liked me. I made them. That was my superpower, making people like me. I knew what to say to them, I knew how to read their body language to tell them exactly what they wanted to hear. Basically, I could charm people.

"I can't. I've gotta go home before dark." That was my mum's one rule. If it's too dark to see if someone might be watching me, come home.

"I'll drive you back," Billy offered as we climbed down the ladder. I patted all of his horses as we went. By drive me home, he meant I could sit on the handlebars of his bicycle like we were in an old movie. But it was better than walking through the dayloode.

He was slow pedaling across the flat field of his family's crops with my added weight. I wished he'd hurry up. It was darker than I wanted it to be and my clothes were soaked to the bone in five seconds. Lighting illuminated the entire field for a second and the booming thunder followed four seconds later.

"Why do you keep lookin round?" Billy asked, panting slightly and pedaling hard. I ignored the question. Way too complicated to tell him the truth and I didn't feel like making up a creative lie.

"Won't your mum be angry you're not home already? I can walk the rest of the way."

"Naw, it's fine." It wasn't fine, I could tell from the tone in his voice. But he was in love with me. Or he thought he was. Real love didn't exist. It was just something people made up in their heads and then defined for themselves. Real love is a fairytale, my mum had told me once when I asked her why I didn't have a dad.

Once the lights of the country house came into view, I could see there were two black cars with tinted windows in the driveway with throw away plates. So they hadn't left yet.

"Drop me here," I ordered. "I don't want your mum to be mad at you." I jumped off the handlebars so he couldn't protest.

"Alright," he agreed. "I'll see he tomorrow, then."

"Wait," I called when he'd already pivoted his bike the other way. "You have to kiss me goodnight." I leaned down and put a peck on his lips, a nice one this time. I grinned cheekily at him. "See you tomorrow, then."

"Yeah," he stuttered. I watched him pedal away towards his house for a minute to make sure he was safe. The rain was getting even heavier and my sweatshirt hood was doing nothing to help me now. I ran towards the lights of the manor, my trainers sinking into the mud well up to my socks. I slowed down once I was approaching the vans and walked slowly toward the door. There was a tall man in a black suit with a silver earpiece in standing just inside the door. A watchdog. That was interesting. Clients normally didn't bring their own. He'd clearly been watching me run through the rain cause he was not surprised at all to see me.

"Hi, I live here," I told him cheerfully. I shook my hair out for good measure so he could see how soaping wet I was. He looked like an assassin, earpiece and tattoo behind ear and all, but I could tell from how clean shaven he was that he was payed pretty well so he was valued by his employers. So he probably had a wife and kids and stuff he had to support. And I was a kid. As I thought, he moved aside and let me in without a word.

"Thanks," I told him in the same cheerful tone. My shoes squeaked on the old floorboards and I knew I shouldn't linger in the hallway. But I wanted to assess first. They were in the dining room, I could see the light under the door and hear my mum talking softly. A deep man's voice was answering her. There was two other guys in there, probably like the doorman. I wasn't sure why this client was so important he needed personal body guards. But I never got told anything. I would have gotten closer to the dining room door so I could actually hear what they were saying, but doorman was watching me and I knew I was meant to go upstairs. And I wanted to change my clothes anyway.

As I turned toward the steep, red carpeted staircase, I took one peek inside the cracked door. They were sitting at the table and I got a quick view of the man who was talking. He was in his mid thirties, wearing a fancy suit and had an ordinary face framed by close cut brown hair. But it was the ordinary ones that were the most important. The whole thing was already weird with the guard dogs. I walked as slowly was I could up the stairs, knowing where to step to avoid creeks. And then the man turned. He looked right at me, I could see how dark his eyes were and even the inquisitive look on his face. I knew I hadn't made a sound, but he'd known I was watching him. I bolted up the rest of the stairs to my room and shut the door. My mum would not be happy if she thought I was snooping. Hopefully he wouldn't tell.

One of my favorite parts about this house, well my only favorite thing, was the old vents. They were real easy to hear through. I could push my ear against the one in my room and hear muffled voice from the dining room. I had to concentrate pretty hard, but I could make out a few words. The man was talking in an amused tone.

"How old is she?" Shit. He had told on me. I was going to get in trouble now, thanks man.

"Thirteen," my mum's familiar voice answered him quickly. Fourteen in two weeks, I wanted to whisper back. Just thirteen made me sound too young. But that's what my mum wanted, she wanted to move the conversation back onto business. She'd told me to go out three hours ago, these people had been here a long time. And it was getting late, it was almost seven thirty. I wanted food but I couldn't go down and get any until they left.

"So the phone and what else do you needed sorted?" The man asked. Okay, boring. My clothes were now soaking the floor. I stopped eavesdropping in favor of stripping them off for new ones. Almost identical jeans, a black T-shirt and red sweater because March was still freezing out in the bloody country. I caught a glance of myself in the mirror. I looked like a drown rat. My ink curls were plastered to my face which was far to pale for hair so dark. What was left of the makeup I'd put on to seduce Billy was running in streaks down my face and my lipstick was smudged. I took it off, no more boys to impress. If I had to talk to the men downstairs, I wanted to look like a little girl anyway. They would see me us unthreatening. That was a mum tip. I let my hair be so it would dry properly and then leaned back down to listen to the vent some more. But then something caught my eye.

There was movement below my window. Figures were walking across the same field I had to get back from Billy's farm. The way they were moving wasn't normal. They were like robots, all stepping together, no arm swinging, not carrying anything, dressed in black. It was too late for silostors. These people were not friends. My heart started to pound, but I couldn't do anything, I'd seen them too late. The man in the middle raised his arm and I saw a flash of silver before a deafening boom- louder than the thunder- shook the old glass in my window pane. A gunshot. The doorman was dead.

I didn't stop to watch anymore. A normal person would have been frozen, but I was normal. I knew how to think when stuff like this happened. It had been happening for as long as I could remember. My mum pissed a lot of people off with her job. Sometimes, even though we moved loads, those people found us. There was more guns going off, in the house now. The intruders were fighting with the now needed guard dogs in the dining room. I couldn't think about if my mum was okay. I had to get the phone.

The stupid, bloody phone. My mum's camera phone was her second and favorited baby. Our entire life was on it. Everything that kept us alive and protected. All the photographs, intell and blackmail that my mum used to threaten and get things from powerful people. And it was that phone the intruders were after. It was what they were always after. My mum kept it in different spots every place we stayed, but it was always the safest one. There was no locked safes in this old house, so we'd just had to bury it.

I ran across the hall, trying to ignore how bad the ancient floor was shaking from the gunshots below me. My mum's room had far less shit in it than mine did. She was always ready to run, never bothered to unpack. I ran into the closet, tossed aside some clothes, a bunch of boxes of more clothes and finally three huge patchwork quilts. In the last one, I could feel the bulge of the camera phone where she had hidden it in the lining. I ripped it out, shoved it in my pocket and kept moving. They'd look for the phone in the house with her. They didn't know I was here to take it away. If I ran, they wouldn't find it. That's all I was allowed to think of. Protect the phone. Protect the phone and it will protect us.

I opened the window and quickly assessed there was no easy or fast way to get down. But I didn't have a choice. There were footsteps coming up the stairs, they'd gotten past the first defence and were looking for people in the house. I climbed out onto the roof shackles. It was a straight drop down now. I carefully lowered myself backwards, gripping at the veins that were growing up the side of the Tudor style brick. Lucky for me, no one had taken care of this house in a long time and vines were old and strong. Until I was ten feet from the ground. That's when the rain made them slippery and I lost my footing. I fell the rest of the way, hitting the ground hard on my back.

I ignored the dazzling pain, scolding myself for not being able to catch myself with my hands like I knew I was supposed to. No time, just run. But run where? It was all farm land. There was nothing to hide behind. There was no time to hotwire one of the cars. Shed. I could hide in the shed. I bolted towards it, not looking behind me, not listening to the sound of the struggle in the house. It was unlocked, just full of old lawn mowers and junk the previous owners left behind. But junk was good, junk meant places to hide. I climbed onto the second floor where the boards creaked more than I wanted them to. People were coming toward me. Even breathing was too loud. I squatted behind a pile of wood that was just high enough so I didn't have to flatten myself completely to the ground. It would take me too long to get up if I had to do that. Squatting meant I could jump up if I needed to. I should have grabbed the rusty saw below me on my way up. But I wasn't fast enough for that, I didn't see it.

The shed door was opening. They'd seen me come in. My heart sank. There was only one exit and two men were now standing in front of it. Shit! I was done, and more importantly, I had the phone. If I could get to the saw, or the hammer, maybe I could fight back, run again… One of the men made a tsking sound like he was calling a dog.

"Where are you girlie? We saw you come in here." American? What the hell did Americans want and how did they find us way out here? Well, it was obvious what they wanted. The phone in my pocket. "Come on, darlin. You can't hide in here for long." He gestured to the man with him. "Check the loft." I shut my eyes for a second. Think, there's a way out of every situation, I just had to see it. I could jump over the side, it would hurt, but it wasn't that far down. Then I could grab the hammer, hit one of them, maybe make it to the door, run toward the road and hope someone was driving by…The shed door opened again. It was a smaller figure this time, much too small.

"Oi, what-" A gunshot cut off the slightly high pitched, shaky voice and a second later, the lanky body hit the ground. Billy. I could tell even in the dark. I'd studied his body. Kill shot, right through the head. I could see his bike parked outside the door. I put my hand over my mouth to muffle my scream, screwing my eyes shut tight now. Block it out, block it out…

"Jake, what the hell is wrong with you?!" The man who'd called me like a dog demanded. "That was a kid!"

"I thought it was another one of those british-!"

"You just shot a kid, Jake!" I tried to stay as still as possible, muffling my breath, keeping my eyes shut to pretend it wasn't real.

"I'll check him, don't worry, I'll get the phone-"

"He doesn't have the phone, you idiot! It was a girl that ran in here, I saw her! A girl with dark hair. She's still here." It was quiet for a moment, too quiet. I kept my eyes shut. There was nowhere to run, they were going to find me now. Even with my eyes shut, all I could see was Billy's body lying on the ground with a hole in between his eyes. The silence was broken suddenly by the sound of more gun shots, a lot of them this time. I couldn't stop from screaming this time, but it was drown out by the fight. A body hit the ground, another body. And then footsteps running.

"Go after him," a deep Irish voice said. The man from the dining room, the one who'd seen me. I heard tires squealing, more gunshots hitting metal this time. The car got away, I could see the headlights going. It was quiet again. There was just creaking footsteps as the client man walked forward. My ears were ringing from the shots and from the sound of my own heartbeat.

"It's alright," the man said softly, such an unusual sound after all the booms and the shouting. The rain was still coming down hard, the wind was whistling past the creaking shed roof. "It's alright, you can come out. I'm working with your mother, I'll take you to her." I opened my eyes. They'd been talking, didn't mean they were working together though. For all I knew, he hired the Americans who just shot up the place and killed Billy.

"My name is Jim Moriarty," the man called, making sure I could hear but still in a soothing sort of way to get me to trust him. But I wasn't stupid. I didn't fall for the poor little kid voice. "The American's are dead, except for one. He got away, but we'll find him." It was casual, the way he was talking. Like there hadn't just been a shootout.

"You can keep hiding up there and wait for your mother, that's fine. But I figured you might be a bit cold. So I'll be here if you decide to come down." There was something odd about him, something just slightly off. And for some reason, I was moving. I was crawling out of my hiding spot so I could look out at him. My eyes had adjusted to the dark now and I could see his grin as he looked up at me.

"Well, there you are. Figured you wouldn't want to stay up there." He was pacing over to the stairs, but I'd stopped watching him. There were three bodies on the ground. Jake's, one of the assassin men that worked for the strange man and Billy. Billy looked so small next to the two grown men. Why had he come back? He was supposed to be home by seven, he'd been late already. His mum would be worried about him. But then my eyes found something. He was clutching something silver in his right fist. My locket. I'd taken it off to kiss him. He'd come back to return it.

"Hey." It occurred to me that I was alone with this strange man, that I should probably be looking at him. But I couldn't stop staring at Billy's face. His eyes were open, he'd landed on his back and he looked so scared. "Do you need a hand to get down?" The strange man, Jim, held out his hand. I started it, not really wanting to take it, but doing it anyway. After I'd taken his hand, he helped me down the last two rungs of the ladder.

"Don't look at him," he adviced me. He moved his body so I couldn't see around him. "What's your name?"

"Ayza," I answered automatically. My voice sounded weird. It sounded weak and afraid. I couldn't sound like that, not in front of this man. That made me a target. I needed to be strong, I needed to get to my mum. If she was alright. Why wasn't she coming for me?

"Your mother's fine." Somehow the man had read my mind. "I'll take her to you, yeah?" He was talking slow like I was stupid. Or in shock. Was I in shock? Was this what shock felt like? The man started guiding me toward the door by my arm, but then he stopped suddenly. He forgot to put his body in front of me so I couldn't see Billy. His eyes were glazed over and glass looking. There was blood trickling into one of them from the hole in his head.

"You have the phone." I realized that the man's eyes were fixed on the buldge in my pocket. "Oh, clever girl. That's why you ran." I met his eyes, confused by his praise. And I didn't like the way he was looking at me. I took the phone out of my pocket and held it tight against my chest.

"Don't worry, I don't want it," he assured me. "Now come on. I'm sure your mother is worried sick about you two." I paused as he was leading me out. Billy was right in front of the door. To get out, I needed to step over his body. Jim stopped too, understanding. That was rare for a killer, which I'd now assumed he was. And a crazy one. I could tell by his eyes.

"Come here," he said. I stared at his arms which he had held open slightly. "I'll give you a lift. Trust me." I did. Why did I trust him? I didn't know him and I'd learned from the time I could speak not to trust anyone, especially strange men. But I walked forward anyway. He put his hands around my waist and lifted me- and the phone I was still cradling tightly- effortlessly over the body and back into the pouring rain.

"There. Alright?" he asked. I stepped away from him. He didn't try to touch me again, he knew I'd follow now. I realized as we walked back toward the house that my arm really hurt from when I fell climbing out the window. That meant my adrenaline was coming down, which meant the shock would end soon. I needed to find my mum. As soon as that thought was passing through my head, I saw her. She was standing in the light of the doorway talking to two more men who hadn't been here before. Or I hadn't seen them. She turned as soon as I saw her and broke off at a run toward me. And then I knew I was safe.

"Ayza!" she pulled me into her arms like she was shielding me from the rain. "Are you alright? Are you okay?" I nodded, glancing at Jim who was watching us silently. "You've got the phone?!" My mom realized, relief and shock flashing across her face.

"Yeah, I got from your room and climbed out the window," I explained. My voice was steadier now, that was good. As long as I didn't think about Billy, I was fine. My mum made a sound that was a mixture of a sigh and a sob. She took the phone from my hands, kissed it and then kissed my head before pulling me back into her arms.

"She's smart," Jim said approvingly. "They would have found if she didn't take it. One of them got away."

"Thank you," my mum said lightly, not sounding at all like herself.

"Oh, I'm not done yet," Jim said in a lazy tone. "Get in the car, I'll take you somewhere that's- uh- not here." He winked at me.

"Why?" My mum asked. I pulled away from her a bit so I could look at both of them, but still stayed under her arm.

"Well, you're no good to me dead," Jim informed her. "And I liked the sound of our arrangement before we were interrupted. You know what they were looking for, don't you?" My mom held the phone tighter in the hand that wasn't wrapped around me. "And if it wasn't for your daughter, they'd have it. Therefore, you have my protection." My mum nodded quickly and stirred me toward one of the black cars. One of the random guys who had shown up was holding open the door or us.

"So we're just gonna go with him?" I whispered once we were shut in the backseat by ourselves.

"Yes, he'll protect us," my mum said, glancing out the window at the exchange going on between Jim and the men who worked for him. There were three of them now, where the hell did they keep coming from?

"Who is he, Mum? Why's he helping us?" She was about to answer me, but then he got into the passenger seat and one of his guys got in the driver's side. The driver somehow knew where to go cause a second later we were pulling away from the manor house. I didn't have much stuff, we moved too much and had to bail a lot. But I had some cute clothes I would have approached grabbing first. But that wasn't so important, because I'd thought of something else.

"Billy's mum," I said out loud. I pulled away from my mum's arm and leaned on Jim's seat in front of me. "The boy who was shot, his mother won't know what happened to him." Jim reached for his phone wordlessly.

"Brax, the dead boy in the shed-" he leaned backwards toward me. "Does have Id?"

"On his bike," I told him. "But he lives- he lived in the farm across the corn field."

"-take the boy's body to the farm across the field. Tell the family it was a random shooting." He hung up the phone.

"Thank you," I mumbled, leaning back again. My mum was being quiet cause she seemed to want to impress this man and didn't quite know how to deal with the fact we were getting help. But she put her arm around me again and held me tighter. She'd tucked the phone safely away so she could hold me with two hands. In the mirror, I saw Moriarty looking back at me. He smiled to himself before looking out the front again. I had a feeling something about me had impressed him. And I also had a feeling that he wasn't going to let us go now.


	2. A House in London

We drove through the country and the rain for what seemed like an eternity. The last thing I remembered was looking at the digital clock and seeing it was after midnight before I leaned my head on the window and shut my eyes. I woke up when the car slowed. The clock now read four AM. I had no idea where we were. Everything was still pitch black except for the headlights on the car that relieved we'd stopped on a curb outside a row of very large houses. My head was still foggy with sleep, but I could tell we were in the city. The street lamps were bright and it looked to be the rich part of town.

"Where are we?" I asked, sitting up. My mum smoothed my hair, not saying anything. That was unusual for her. She was normally in control of everything. But she'd just let this man drive us to some unknown destination in the city in the middle of night with no questions at all. Jim Morarity glanced in the reviewer mirror at us and straightened the collar on his tailored suit.

"Home for the next few weeks. If of course you've agreed to our arraignment." He winked at my mum and I had a feeling if she said no our next stop would be over the side of Tower Bridge.

"Of course," my mum told him, starting to sound a bit normal. Moriarity's grin widened into a smirk.

"Then get out." I probably reached for my door handle too fast. If there was anything I'd learned from the thousands of people my mum had worked with or for, it was that none of them did anything out of the goodness of their hearts. It was always an arrangement, they always wanted something in return. The house we'd driven up to was much larger than the one we left. It was old looking, made of all white marble with roman columns by the front door. They both had the number forty four on them. The houses to the left and right looked the same but with their own numbers. It was dark, clearly nobody lived in it, and much too big for just the two of us. My mum and Morarity were talking too quietly for me to hear as i looked up at the big house.

"Key's under the mat," I heard him say. "I'll call."

"I'm looking forward to it," my mum said back. I didn't believe in ghosts, but if I did this house would be haunted. It looked forbidding and dangerous. Probably because it had been the home to lots of criminals. Which meant people had died in it. Which meant there could be a lot of ghosts. Billy's face flashed through my mind, but I shoved it away. I didn't have to think about him, I could block it out. That had always been easy for me to do. His family most likely knew he was dead now. But it didn't matter. I'd never see them again.

"Ayza," Moriarty's voice called from the car and I turned to look at him. "I think I'll be seeing you again soon." I knew it was polite to say something back, thank you maybe, but I didn't. I hugged my arms and met his eyes in a way I didn't think people did often. I wasn't sure I liked him. And I wasn't nice to people I didn't like. But he only smirked, waved goodbye and told the driver to go. Once the car was gone, I felt like I was safe for the first time since I saw the armed americans coming up the driveway.

"Let's go inside then," my mum suggested. I knew that voice. That was her everything's fine when it really isn't voice. She used it all time. She got the key from under the mat, just where he said it would be. All the lights in the surrounding identical row of white houses were dark. But I expected if someone was awake, they'd be very confused to see new people in this neighborhood. They were probably all rich and over the age of sixty five. It wasn't going to be easy to hide here. Obviously the neighbors were going to gossip. My mum swung the door open and I followed her in.

The inside was as posh looking as the outside was. There was a huge white staircase directly in front of me that went to the second floor and the balconies overlooking the entryway. In the dark, I could see the outline of a large parlor to the left and and a dining room with a dozen place settings to the right. Definitely too big for two people. It felt empty and cold even after my mum found the light switch. There was a big chandelier above us that reminded me of Phantom of the Opera.

"Well, could be worse," my mum mused, folding her arms playfully. "We'll need some staff though." I moved quickly toward the stairs, away from her. I wasn't afraid of the dark, not really. And I didn't want to stand down there listening to her pretend anymore. She called after me once, but didn't follow. She never did. That would require actual parenting and she left that up to someone else at every available turn. All the doors were unlocked of course, so I looked through the bedrooms- I counted five of them- until I found one I liked. It had a big bathroom and a jacuzzi tub which the country house had definitely not had. I locked myself in and turned on the water, comforted by the loud noise it made.

Of course once I was in the bath and very much alone, it was harder to keep the thoughts out. I could hear Billy's voice in my head. He'd been so excited about some girl in his class. I'd been jealous of her, though I wasn't sure why now. I hadn't been in love with a country boy. He was just fun to play with. He'd never get to try out all the things I taught him with the girl now. And his mum was going to cry because he was her youngest and only son and it was my fault he was dead. But she'd never know that. She'd never know how he died. I sunk below the water, letting the echo fill my ears. I held my breath for a long time, counting the seconds until all that there was was the numbers and the memories went away. I was never going to think about him again, I decided. I'd put him away in a box and my mind and leave him there. Time to move on. Who was Jim Morarity?

I went downstairs one I was done reseting myself in the bath. I didn't have any clothes besides the filthy ones I'd been wearing. They were covered in hay and dirt from scrambling around in the shed. But there was a bathroom hanging on the door. There was a lot of things, actually. Shampoo and soap, for example. It seemed like the person who used to live here hadn't completely moved out. The bathroom was much too long and I tripped over it as I went down the stairs. But I'd get new clothes soon. They always just showed up at the new places we stayed. Clothes, food, stuff like that. They just appeared like magic. I was almost surprised when I went downstairs that there weren't people already coming in the never ending revolving door.

The first light of morning was coming in the stained glass windows and I could hear my mum's voice talking quietly from the parlor. She was on the phone of course. She was always on the phone. I'd long ago learned not to listen. She glanced up at me when I walked in, but that was all I got. She was using her acting voice, which meant whatever she was saying was lies and unimportant. I went to the giant window on the north wall and pulled back the ornate curtains. Light flooded the room so dramatically that my mum flinched and turned away from it.

"Thank you love," she said in her pleasant give me what I want because I'm pretty voice. "I'll be seeing you soon. Yes, number forty four Eaton Square. Bye." She hung up.

"Is that where we are?" I asked. I acted like I wasn't mad. Even though it was her fault. She got us into trouble like this all time. She didn't answer my question, but she did seem pleased I wasn't upstairs pouting anymore.

"How about breakfast, darling? Before people get here and I've got to work." She made a pouty her face and stuck her bottom lip out because she knew it made me laugh.

"Are you gonna try cooking again?"

"Of course not, this house is too pretty to burn down. There's pastries in the fridge."

I had learned at around the age of four something that most people don't figure out till they're in their thirties. How to take care of myself. And in a huge city with all the money I could want, it wasn't that hard. Unlike in the country, I didn't have to find my own entertainment. I could just leave the house and find something to do. I needed all new clothes so that was my project for the first week. I had a feeling we'd be at this house for a bit and there was a really big closet in my room that was sad without nourishment. I tried to say out of the house as much as possible. It had taken my mum a solid twenty four hours to fill it with staff. But what I had noticed was the lack of clients. She normally had one in the house at a time. It was always fun when she had two or three because she had to shuffle them around so they wouldn't figure out they weren't special. But it had been quiet. She'd been on the phone a lot more and I had a pretty good idea that Jim Morarity was the culprit.

We'd been in the house for a week the morning I came home to a unmarked black limo on the curb. The windows were tinted, so I couldn't see if anyone was inside. But it looked strange. It didn't have any markings on it, no company names, no flags. So I walked past it and went in. There was a new woman standing in the entryway and she was pretty enough to be a model. She was giving the staff orders about where to put various bits of furniture my mum had ordered. I walked in with a bunch of bags of clothes and she'd stopped her ordering about to come and greet me.

"Hi, you must be Ayza."

"Yep." I ducked as two men carried a love seat by and almost decapitated me with it. "Are we being featured on extreme home makeover?"

"Oh, I love that show!" The woman said enthusiastically. "I'm Kate, by the way."

"Great," I said chipperly, mimicking her tone. "Is my Mum here?"

"She's upstairs with a client," Kate told me. I had a feeling she was one herself. My mum liked the pretty ones. "Want some help with those bags? This is cute!" She'd taken one of the bags without waiting for me to finish and pulled out a purple sundress I'd bought. "The lilac color will go good with your eyes." Normally people like her annoyed me, but something told me she was acting. She was distracting me.

"Thanks. So who's my mum got up there that it's so important for you to block the entire staircase? The queen of England?" As soon as the words left my mouth, I heard a door creak and every singular man carrying furniture stopped abruptly to look up at the balcony. There was a fair amount of giggling and then a woman stepped out of my mum's bedroom. I had to blink a total of three times to confirm to myself that I was in fact seeing the person now walking toward me down the stairs. She was still laughing and her face was flushed red. A few of the staff members curtsied as the woman walked past. She grinned at me, much prettier in person than any TV screen or magazine had been able to capture.

"You didn't see anything," she said, holding her finger to her lips. And then she was gone, getting into the back of the unmarked limo and driving away. I ran up the stairs to my mum's room. Her door was shut, but I didn't bother knocking. The client was gone. My mum was sitting on her bed wearing a wrap and replying lipstick with one hand while she cradled her phone between her neck and her shoulder.

"Mum what the hell-" she held up a finger, telling me to wait.

"Sorry, is this a bad time?" she said to whoever was on the line. She waited a moment as the person replied and I noted how she turned toward the window, away from me so I couldn't see her face. "I did what you said. I got the pictures. But I've got some bad news. My cryptographer couldn't decode the email." I heard a muffled shout on the other side of the line. I could tell it was a shout because I wouldn't be able to hear it otherwise and my mum's shoulders tensed.

"I couldn't decode the email," she repeated, quieter and tenser this time. "But I've got the pictures. I'll send them to the government and then they'll call Sherlock Holmes. He can decode the email, like you said." Sherlock Holmes? He was the detective that was all over the news. He solved crimes the police couldn't figure out. The person said something else and my mum readjusted the phone like she was waiting, on hold.

"Is that Morarity?" I asked, sitting on the end of the bed. She didn't answer me. She never told me what her work was even when it was directly affecting me. It wasn't fair. The phone clicked, the person picked up again. And this time I was close enough to hear what he said.

" _So if you have what you say you have, I will make you rich. If you don't, I'll make you into shoes."_

"I'll send them to you," my mum told him. It was Jim Moriarty's voice, like I thought.

" _No copies, don't you know anything? Send them to the government and wait for my call. I'll be paying a visit soon."_ There was a click when he hung up.

"What email?" I pressed, lounging casually on the bed to act like I wasn't that interested when I really was. "Why do we need a detective to decode it? Also, why do you need pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge in compromising positions?" My act worked. She smiled and flopped down next to me so we were lying side by side on the crumpled sheets looking up at the stained glass mural of a sunbeam on the ceiling.

"It's only part of an email, a series of numbers like a code, .I photographed it ages ago. Do you remember the man with the bad tan and the funny hat?" I nodded. "He was looking at it on his laptop. It seemed important, thought I'd save it. Turns out,it is because Jim Moriarty wants it as payment."

"And what's he giving us in return" I asked.

"Protection. And a way to make money off all the stuff I've got." She said it like it was no big deal. Not dangerous at all. And yet people had already died because of it. I knew the answer before I asked the question, but I wanted her to confirm it.

"So that's why the Americans were looking for us. They want whatever's on the email."

"Mmhmm." She started twirling a piece of my hair absently around her finger. "But they won't find us again. My partnership with Morarity insures that. Until he has the code, we're safe."

"And afterwards?"

"When did you become the adult?" she asked accusingly. "What happened to my baby bug in pigtails and no front teeth?"

"The teeth came in," I said jokingly. I didn't tell her what I was really thinking. That all of this was a bad idea. That we might be safe for now, but once we weren't useful anymore then we wouldn't be. I didn't like arguing with her. And I didn't like showing her that I was scared. It made her upset and I hated when she was upset.

"So now we need a detective to crack the code and get our protection?" I summed up.

"It's going to take some time," she agreed. "But Jim's sorted it all out for me. That's what he does. He helps people like me who have loads of stuff on other people but don't know what to do with it."

"So he's like a criminal that helps other criminals be better ones?"

"Exactly. And now that I have the photographs, I can get the British Government to do whatever I say. We can have anything we want. We'll never have to run again. How's that sound?"

"Good."

"Good." She pressed a kiss to my temple. "I've got more work to do, bug. Why don't you help Kate with getting things sorted downstairs? I want this place to look like a palace."

"Why, is she coming back?" I asked eagerly. It wouldn't be so horrible to have the future queen over for tea once in awhile.

"Maybe. She was yummy." My mum bobbed my nose. "I'll see you later, go have fun." By go have fun, she meant leave so I can get back to work. But I was used to that. This didn't have to be a bad thing. It was just another change. Another job, another place to live. Soon it would be over and there'd be something else. Or at least that's what I told myself as I went back downstairs to play decorate the dollhouse. But this felt different. It felt like something bad was coming. But also something important and exciting. And I had a feeling it's name was Jim Morarity.


	3. A Job

**Chapter 3**

My mum wasn't perfect. We'd never had a normal life, so there'd been no time for a normal mother daughter relationship. Thought she never said it out loud, I knew she felt guilty for that. Her way of compensating had changed throughout my life. This particular year, it was birthday presents. Materialistic things had always been my mum's way of showing affection. So lot's of new clothes and a phone were basically code for I love you, happy birthday. She also didn't talk about work for a solid twelve hours which was very impressive. Someone looking in from the outside may have thought there was no way my mum and I would get along. But we actually did. Neither of us talked about our emotions, so there was hardly any fighting. And most of the time she was working so often I didn't spend enough time around her to hate her. Or at least that's how I tried to think about it.

"That one's adorable," she told me when I tried on one of the dozen new t-shirts she'd bought me. "It was better with the black skirt though."

"I like the blue one." It had gotten dark, which meant I'd successfully survived another birthday. I was pretty sure the whole I don't want to get old and I hate my birthday thing was supposed to come later in life. But fourteen seemed so much older than thirteen for some reason. Maybe it was the weird sense of dread that had been following me since we moved into the house. I felt like by my fifteenth birthday, things were going to be different. Like a year from today, I wouldn't get to sit in front of a fire with my mum drinking tea, just the two of us which happened so rarely. I knew there was no reason for me to feel that way. But my whole life I'd had strange feelings about things and often I was right. Like I was some mad psychic. Maybe that was the answer. I had superpowers. My question was answered when the door opened without a ring or a knock and in stepped Jim Moriarty flanked by two men in sunglasses and earpieces. I watched the smile fall from my mum's face as she got up to greet them.

"Sorry I didn't call ahead, darling." I didn't like the way he kissed her cheek like they were old friends and he was popping by for a casual visit. "I was just in the neighborhood. Hope you're not busy."

"For you, I'd make time anywhere," she told him. It sounded like she was flirting, but I could tell the difference and knew she wasn't. She was just indulging him because he was her boss and she didn't have a choice. She held out her hand toward the kitchen. Away from me. Looked like my birthday was going to be over a few hours early.

"Actually, I'm not here for you," Moriarty told her. And then he looked over her shoulder at me. "I was hoping I could borrow your daughter."

"For what?" my mum asked carefully. Not liking being talked about while I was standing in the room, I got up and walked over to her. Moriarty's eyes seized me up like a scanner on a hard drive. Or a virus.

"A little job," he shrugged. "It's not a dangerous one, but one my staff isn't equipped to handle." The two men behind him that were wearing sunglasses to shield their eyes from the light of the moon seemed pretty able bodied to me. "I'll give her straight back," he promised my mum who didn't seem convinced at all. But I wanted to do it. I didn't care what it was, I wanted to do it.

"What's the job?" I asked.

"Oh good, you agree," Morarity beamed. To my surprise, my mum didn't say anything when he pulled a file out of his jacket pocket and handed it to me. The first document was a picture of a girl with auburn hair wearing a school uniform. She looked to be about my age. The picture was taken by someone standing across the street from her. The next few pictures were the same, they were watching her.

"She's called Jaime Emerson," Moriarty informed me. I hadn't noticed he'd gotten closer to me to point over my shoulder at a line of text. "Her Daddy, Matthew Emerson, works for the government and he's got some super secret files on his computer that I want."

"Can't you just remote hack it or something?" I asked. "Why do you need me to make friends with his daughter and sneak into his house?"

"That's not what I said I wanted." The change in his voice made me look up at him. It wasn't joking anymore. But he was still smiling.

"Is it what you want?" I asked bravely. My mum tensed for the first time.

"Of course," Moriarty beamed. "I want you to be Jaime Emerson's new best friend. Slumber parties and all that. And then you put this memory stick-" he snapped at one of his guys and then handed the stick to me- "Into Daddy's computer and give it back to me. Sound easy enough?" I glanced at the picture of Jaime. I'd never had trouble making friends.

"I can get the information for you," my mum spoke up. "I'll introduce myself to Emerson, you can have it by tomorrow."

"Yes, but I want her to do it." Moriarty was looking at me with eyes that were hard to look back at. "You're good with computers, aren't you? You'll be able to get past the firewall, find the right file for me and copy it much faster."

"He works for the government though," I said, feeling a bit of doubt fill my stomach. "He'll have really good security to guard his important stuff."

"Then you'll just have to be a really good hacker."

"But I'm not a hacker," I said quickly. The look on my mum's face told me to shut up and let her handle this, but it was my job now. "I mean, I'm good at math and Sudoku puzzles but I don't think I can get into that computer."

"Have you ever tried?" Moriarty asked patiently. "Hacking anything, have you ever tried?" I shook my head truthfully and he grinned again. "Well then, you're my girl." He started moving toward the door before there were any more protests. "Oh, and I need it by this time tomorrow if you don't mind. Time sensitive and all that. Happy birthday by the way. Consider this your gift." And then the door was shutting behind him and his goons and they were gone, leaving my mum and I alone like they'd never been here at all.

"What was that about?" I asked out loud. My mum was staring at the now closed door with an unreadable expression her face. "Mum?"

"You don't have to do it if you don't want to," she said, still not looking at me. "I can get what he wants." I ran the stick over in my fingers a few times.

"I want to. It's not dangerous or anything. I just have to make a friend."

"And sneak into a government official's office and steal information off his computer without him knowing." I shrugged.

"Worst thing that could happen if I got caught is he takes me to jail. And then I'll pout and cry and tell them some stupid excuse." She finally met my eyes.

"It's not a game, Ayza."

"Then why'd you agree to it?" We both knew the answer to that, so she didn't bother responding. She couldn't say no to Jim Morarity, no matter what his request was. If she did, we'd both end up dead in a river somewhere. There was no choice but to play his game. And I didn't mind. It seemed like it might be fun.

When I was younger, I used to want to go to school more than anything. School meant I could have friends, I could play on the playground and wear the uniform that said I was a part of something. But I never thought my first introduction to school would be like this. Newton Prep was the kind of rich, posh school that a man working for the British government would send his daughter to. Conveniently, it was only a mile from forty four Eaton square, my new home. Or maybe it wasn't a coincidence at all. Maybe Moriarty had been planning for me to do this since the day he met me. That was the more likely option.

It didn't take me long to find Jaime in the sea of other students filtering through the doors for class. She was walking by herself which made her stand out since most of the other girls walked in packs of at least three. I had a plan in my head of how I was going to do this. I'd already done the first part, getting into the school's system and enrolling myself. It would look strange for a new student to be starting in April of year eight, but normal people were too stupid to second guess it once they saw the paperwork. I cut around Jaime's path so I ended up in front of her and then I put on my best confused face, looking up at the building like it was the most daunting thing I'd ever seen. Which in a way, it was. A school was completely foreign to me.

"Hi," I said in a fake shy tone just as Jaime was walking past. She was really pretty. Her hair was a unique color of copper and she had big brown eyes. "Sorry, but do you know where Mr. Ajay's maths class is? It's my first day."

"Yeah, it's upstairs," she said immediately, her face breaking into a kind smile. She'd looked sad before. I wondered why. "I have that class now, so I'll just walk you." I already knew that. Once I was into the school's system, I'd accessed her schedule and made a few of my classes match hers.

"Awesome, thanks!" We walked side by side through the busy cue of students pushing their way into the first class of the day.

"It's a bit late to be starting at a new school, isn't it?" Jaime asked as we walked. Pretending to be someone else wasn't hard for me. In fact, I found it fun. She wouldn't like the real me anyway. "We're only here two more months."

"Well, my Mum wanted me to get to know some people first," I explained. I"d made myself an entire cover story on the walk here. I didn't have to trick any Government officials, just a girl, so it didn't have to be too elaborate. I smiled pleasantly at her and found it wasn't too difficult. She had a nice face. I almost felt bad I was tricking her.

"I'm Allie."

"Jaime." She shook my hand. Luckily, she wasn't shy. Jaime seemed more than eager to introduce me to some of her friends and find me a seat.

"You're new?" asked a boy in the row in front of us. He was practically squirming at the idea of fresh meat.

"Yeah, I transferred."

"Awesome!" He nudged some of the boys in his row and they all started muttering to each other and grinning, glancing back every now and then. One of the girls in my row Jamie had introduced to me nudged me. I remembered her name was Sarah.

"Don't' mind them. They're just gits who aren't used to seeing pretty girls."

"You're pretty," I told her. I didn't understand why public school systems seemed to convince girls they were all ugly and should be self conscious. Sarah laughed and on my other side, Jamie was rolling her eyes and pulling out paper to take notes.

"Oh, I get it, your a lesbian right?" Sarah asked.

"Uh no," I said immediately. "But you are, right?" She got really quiet and started looking at the desk. I shouldn't have said that. I didn't say it to be mean, it was just true. Maybe this would be harder than I thought. Jamie was staring at me. But then she smiled and laughed a little, going back to her notes just as the teacher walked in.

"Good morning class." He put his papers down, scanned the room and immediately found my unfamiliar face. "As I'm sure some of you have noticed, we have a new student with us." he scanned his stack of papers. "Annie Winters, yes?" I nodded. "I'm sure you will all be welcoming to Annie, won't you?" The students half halfhearted agreed, most distracted by something else.

"Well alright Annie, we've been starting algebra from the start of term, do you think you can keep up?" I didn't like teachers like this. They thought they were gods and the students were their little worshipers.

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Let's get started then." He started writing problems on the board. They were equations that I'd taught myself when I was around five. I'd always liked maths and since I didn't go to proper school, my mum had just bought me books to read. Math ones were my favorites, I just taught myself by reading. However, the rest of the students around me looked more and more perplexed as the lesson went on. Jaime was trying hard, scribbling answers on her paper and trying to keep up with the teacher. So that would be my way in. She seemed to like when I was smart with Sarah before.

"Can anyone tell me what the slope of this line is using the slope intercept form?" The teacher asked. I wrote the answer down on a piece of paper and slipped it over to Jamie. She frowned at it and then back up at me.

"Anybody?" Jaime raised her hand.

"Annie knows." I wanted her to answer it, why was she calling me out? The teacher raised his eyebrows expectantly.

"It's two," I told him.

"Good, maybe you can keep up." Tone of surprise, really? He kept teaching and Jaime leaned over to whisper in my ear.

"It's okay to be shy. Mr. Ajay's tough. But he'll like you if you're smart." I spent the rest of the class drawing real equations on some notebook paper Jamie lent me. It kept me entertained enough. I was reading a book about Zimmer's theorems which weren't that difficult, but took up time. The bell rang and everyone hurried to get their bags and rush the door with the same speed as someone exiting a busy train.

"Hey ,you didn't even write the formula down," Jaime noted.

"I like maths," I shrugged.

"I'm awful at it." I walked beside her in the busy hallway. I knew my next class was with her because I'm made it that way. And if everything was as easy as maths, this school was just going to put me to sleep.

"I could help you if you want," I offered. Her face lit up.

"Really? That would great, my dad's really big on grades and he'll be furious if I don't get a good mark this term." Her posh way of speaking reminded me how much money her dad probably made.

"No problem. Can I come to your house after school? Mine's a bit cluttered, we're still moving."

"Sure. What's your next class?"

"English in 206."

"Oh my god, me too!"

"You've gotta solve for x first." Jaime and I had our maths books and homework spread across her queen sized bed. We'd been at it for about an hour. I knew I should be getting into the computer, but I actually didn't mind spending time with Jaime. And she was getting good. She could find the slope by herself now.

"I keep forgetting that! I just want to get to the answer," she complained. She was munching on the cookies her mum had brought up for us. The house was extremely big and fancy, but the family seemed normal enough. I'd mostly been playing with her little dog called Trevor.

"You're getting better already," I told her. "Uh, where's your loo?"

"Down the hall on the left." I pushed the dog off of me and went out in the hall with no intention of finding the loo. The memory stick Moriarty gave me seemed to have been getting hotter and hotter in my pocket. When Jamie had brought me upstairs, I'd spotted her dad's office door. I knew it was the office because it had a do not disturb sign on the handle like they have at hotels. He wasn't home though, there was no one in there. I'd asked Jamie about her dad, she said he had a government job and didn't come home till late. But still I felt my heart racing as I pushed open the door and shut it behind me.

His laptop was sitting on the desk. I could almost hear the suspenseful music from the movies as I walked toward and it and turned it on. It needed a password of course. Just try, Moriarty had told me. I knew how to hack things, I'd read books about it. I just needed to try. In the password box, I typed in a code that was supposed to scan through potential letters till it made a match. It worked, the computer opened. That was too easy. I'd made that code a while back while I was bored after reading about how computer programmers could make their own scramble devices.

But now that I was in the computer I realized I had no idea what to copy. He had loads of files and all of them looked somewhat important. So I decided to copy them all. I stuck in the memory stick and started dragging folders, aware that the normal time for someone to be in the loo was three minutes. Suddenly one of the files started flashing. It wanted an admin password. I put my scramble code in again and it did something weird. The alert box started to flash in and out of the screen. A firewall maybe. I'd read loads of coding books. So I tried something new. Certain keys imputed certain information that told the computer to do things. It was just a matter of speaking the language. It worked. My new code made the box stop flashing and I copied the file. I could have left it there, took the stick out and went back to the safety of Jamie's room. But how could I not look at the file? I at least deserved that for having to survive a middle school for a day.

When I opened the file, it was a single picture. It was the blueprints for a plane with all the numbered seats and rows. Why was the outline of a plane so important it needed a file wall on the computer of a man who worked for the British Government? The name of the file was a jumbled set of numbers. 2174- 124. And under it was a name; Mycroft Holmes. Holmes. Was he related to the detective my mum was stalking for Moriarty? He had to be, coincidences were statistic fairy tales.

There were footsteps coming up the stairs. I hurried to close the windows and put the computer back to sleep. The door was opening. There was no time to hide, I managed to yank the memory stick out at the last second and put in my back pocket. A middle aged man with a custom tailored suit and the same copper colored hair as Jamie opened the door. He stopped short when he saw me, clearly surprised to see a teenage girl standing in his office.

"Hello," he smiled pleasantly but also skeptically. He instantly looked at the black computer screen behind me. My heart was pounding so fast, I was shocked he couldn't hear it.

"Sorry, I was just using the toilet," I explained, pointing to the opposite door where the bathroom was. The setup of this house had just saved me. If there wasn't a loo attached to to his office, it would be over.

"Ah." I saw his shoulders relax slightly. "There's another one on the right, off the hall."

"Sorry," I said again. "I didn't see it." I smiled back at him. The memory stick felt like it was on fire in my pocket. What if he'd be able to see the bulge when I turned around?

"My wife told me you offered to help Jamie with her homework, that was kind of you." He was continuing to talk to me because he was suspicious. I had to keep throwing him off.

"Yeah, she was really nice to me. I started new today."

"Really? Did your family just move here?"

"Yes."  
"Where from?"

"Ireland. My mum works for a bank, we travel a lot. I'll be here for year nine at least though."

"Where's your father?" These questions were starting to feel like an interrogation. He kept glancing at the computer like it was going to come to life.

"He died when I was five," I lied. I had no idea who my father was and my mum had told me with the amount of clients she had, she didn't know either. She told me once that my existence had taught her the valuable lesson of being careful. Probably not the best thing to say to your kid, but I was over it.

"Oh, I'm sorry. Are you staying for dinner?"

"I have to go, actually. We're still unpacking and stuff." He smiled, gesturing for me to step out the door so he could walk me back to Jamie's room. And keep asking questions.

"Whereabouts did you move?"

"Eaton Square." This perked up a bit. He liked that my family came from money. I was more suitable to be friends with his daughter now.

"Lovely area. Jamie, I was just chatting with your friend. It's about time you made one that wasn't a boy." Jamie's face turned bright red. "You're welcome anytime-"

"Annie," I smiled, shaking his outstretched hand. I kept my back facing away from him, hiding the memory stick shaped bulge in my pocket.

"Annie." He smiled again and finally went to leave. But then his eyes caught a piece of paper hanging out of my rucksack. He picked it up before I could think of anything to stop him and started examining it. His eyes widened and I saw the smile fall from his face. I started plotting my escape. Jamie's windows couldn't be that high. I could probably jump without dying.

"You've read Zimmer," he noted. I made the most innocent face I possibly could. I was running excuses through my mind as quickly as possible but coming up with nothing believable.

"What's a Zimmer?" Jamie asked.

"He's a mathematician," her father told her. "An era defining one, I'm told." He handed the paper back to me. "Did you solve those?"

"Yes, sir." It was the only thing I could say. I could say the teacher did it, but then he'd ask the teacher and I'd caught in a lie.

"Well, it seems you shouldn't be in a pre algebra course then." He smiled again and I got the sense that this time, it was genuine. He was buying it, he thought I was some smart kid his daughter was lucky to meet.

"I don't want it be a big deal," I told him. Jaime snatched the paper from me.

"That's wicked! But don't worry, I won't tell. I know you're shy."

"Thanks," I told her gratefully. "I really have to go though, my mum wanted me to finish unpacking my room."

"Do you want a ride?" Mr. Emerson asked. Or maybe he hadn't bought it. I really couldn't tell.

"No, that's okay. I can get a taxi. See you tomorrow, Jaime." He then insisted on calling me a taxi and waiting until I got in it. And I didn't think it was because he was nice. I didn't really breathe until I was walking in the front door of my house. My mum had clearly been waiting for me because she never stopped what she was doing to acknowledge I'd walked in the door.

"How'd it go?" The house had changed while I was gone. It had new furniture and smelt like spices. I held out the memory stick.

"Got it. The dad was suspicious though-" My mum grinned.

"But you got it?" I shrugged and she hugged me. "I"m proud of you, you know that? Don't worry about Emerson. Even if he finds out what you did, no one will believe a fourteen year old hacked his computer." Unless he told them about Zimmer. But I figured I shouldn't bring that up to my mum. She didn't like it when she knew i was doing stuff like that for some reason. Maybe she didn't want me to smarter than her.

"Now it's over," she told me confidently. "And you don't have to do anything like that ever again."

"Actually Mum, I kind of like school." I shuffled my feet a bit. I doubted she was going to agree to let me go back. Dangerous and all that. "I mean, if we're staying here for a while do you think I could maybe go back?" I couldn't really read the look her face.

"We can talk about it," she told me. That meant no. There were so few moments when we actually talked, there was no way it would be brought up again before the end of term. I gave her the memory stick and went up to bed. The next morning I was awakened extremely early to her throwing open my shades.

"Well come on," she told me. "You're going to be late for school."


	4. Road Trip

**This took me forever to write, but here it is! Enjoy :)**

With the speed with which the eight year class flooded out of the school on the last day of term, I would have thought the building was on fire. It sounded like there was a match on as they all whooped and ran into the road headed for home like they'd just escaped prison. But some of the students weren't so excited. Jamie had been 'condemned' as she put it, to spend her summer on an island in Wales with her parents.

"I'm gonna be alone with them for two full months," she said in the devastated kind of voice I'd associate with the news someone close to her had just died. We were following behind the pack of glee shouting students who were getting into their parents cars at the end of the drive. A rather anti climatic end to their victory run. If being at this school had taught me anything in the last few months, and academically it hadn't taught me a thing, it was that people my age were a lot younger than I thought they were. They talked about their parents a lot. One of Jamie's friends, a boy called Archie, said his mum wouldn't threatened to put a microchip in him after he came home at nine thirty instead of nine one night. Most of the friends I'd made had two parents living in a posh house with brothers and sisters and their parents had normal jobs and cared what time they came at night. I'd gotten quite good at pretending I was like them, but the more I did, the more I wished it was true. I'd give anything to spend two months on a remote island with Jamie's parents.

"Do you want a ride again?" she asked as we approached her mum's car. I'd determined Amanda Emerson was a very nice woman, though she was a bit dull and let her husband run her life. She was good at making pastries though.

"Alright," I agreed. It was better than walking the mile home and this might be the last time I got to see Jamie for two months. I had the numbers of other kids in my class now. Some of them I even considered friends, but Jamie and I had gotten particularly close. Her father had kept an eye on me after that day we first met, but he seemed to forget it after a while and I spent far more time at her house than my own. Her mother had threatened to give me my own draw so I didn't have to keep lugging my clothes back and forth.

"Good last day girls?" Mrs. Emerson asked as we got into the back of her car.

"Mum, why can't I just stay here with Annie for the summer? I'm sure her mum wouldn't mind, would she, Annie?"

"Uh," I muttered images flashing through my mind of what our house had looked like since we moved here. It was a revolving door of clients. Jamie had gotten so excited about being asked to a school dance last week that she'd talked to me about it for three hours. And then she got scared to kiss him goodnight and ducked out of it.

"That's out of the question, it's a family vacation," her mum told her sternly. "We're not going to impose on Annie's mother, she's a busy woman." Busy wasn't the adjective I'd choose. Just as Mrs. Emerson was about to pull away from the curb, Jaime still protesting, there was a loud honk from the car beside us. Everyone in the area was staring because the glossy black sheen of a Lamborghini was even more posh than the other million dollar cars come to pick up their fourteen year olds.

"Wicked!" Jamie gasped as the car pulled up alongside us. The drivers side rolled down their tinted window and my stomach plummeted as I recognized the driver. He tapped the horn again and then gestured for me to get out of the Emerson's car and into his.

"Oh my god, do you know him?" Jamie gasped. I as assessing the situation and realizing the fastest and easier way out of this was going to be to get in Moriarty's Lamborghini.

"Is that the man that came round to our house the other night?" Mrs. Emerson asked, frowning.

"He did?" Jamie and I said in unison.

"While you girls were at the dance. He works with your father, you know him, Annie?" He works with my mum was what I wanted to say, but now that would be too suspicious. I thought we were stealing from Mr. Emerson, now he was working with him? Or for him. Because whatever information I'd gotten on the memory stick Morarity was most likely now using to blackmail Jamie's dad. If I got in the car, I could ask him about it.

"He's my uncle," I lied causally. "I forgot he was picking me up. I'll you see later, then." Jamie looked distraught as I jumped out of the car.

"Come round tomorrow so you can say goodbye!" I waved at her in response. I noticed Mrs. Emerson was making the first smart assumption I'd ever observed her to have. She was frowning at Moriarty. She didn't like him and she was right not to. The second I got into the car, he reared the engine and sped away from the school like it was a show. He was grinning in his mirror at the people we'd left behind and driving far too fast through the residential streets.

"You and Mr. Emerson are business partners now?" I asked, reaching for my seat belt as we went around a corner so fast I was surprised the car didn't' topple on it's side.

"Oh, we go way back, Matthew and I," he said casually.

"Then why did you-"

"Make you steal from him? Because I wanted to see if you could do it." He laughed like I was an endearing, stupid child who'd fallen for a magic trick. "I could have asked him for the information on his laptop, I could have taken it myself. There were a thousand ways I could have gotten it, but I choose you because I knew there was something about you I liked. It was like an interview."

"An interview?" My voice sounded a bit shaky. We were pulling onto the motorway, which definitely wasn't in the direction of my house. I'd gotten into the car assuming he was taking me home since my mind had been racing with so many other questions. I was now realizing I was alone in a car with Jim Moriarty and I had no idea where he was taking me.

"For the job," he explained. "If you want it."

"What job?"  
"Oh, obvious, surly. You can work for me." I figured he was joking, but he seemed serious about this one. Not that I could tell with him, he was impossible to read like I did with other people. We were speeding fast around other cars who parted like the red sea for our flashy one anyway.

"Aren't you supposed to be like- underground or something?" I asked. "Low key? Can't people catch you if you're out in the open like this?" He laughed and this time, it sounded genuine. I wondered how many people could make Jim Moriarty really laugh.

"Who's going to catch me? What would they do if they got me? They'd find no evidence of anything. It's much more fun than hiding, don't you think? So what do you say? Want the job?"

"What would I have to do?" I asked cautiously.

"Well, that depends on how you do today, but I've got some ideas." He didn't finish the answer. I started looking at the signs we were passing which took effort with how fast they were going by. We were headed north, out of London.

"Where are we going?" I hadn't asked yet because I wasn't sure I wanted to know. Had he just decided I was working for him and now he was taking me to a secret lab somewhere that I couldn't leave? I had my phone, I could ring my mum but I didn't think it would make much difference. She was already working for him, though she called it a partnership. I'd have to get myself out of this and the best way to do that was indulge him.

"Cambridge University," he said in a posh British accent that almost made me smile. "For the second part of your interview."

"You mean test? You tested me before to see if I could lie and hack things and I'm taking more tests at the college."

"Right you are, see you are qualified."

"Smart you mean?"

"We'll see," he grinned.

"So what am I doing at the college? Stealing something else?"

"No, you're gonna meet a friend of mine. He called me, he needs some help."

"And you think I can help him?" He answered with another grin. If my knowledge of geography was correct, it should have taken us two hours to get from the city to the college with this traffic. It took us under an hour with his driving skills that most of the time had me clinging to the side of my door and bracing for impact.

"Did you tell my Mum you were taking me?" I asked as we pulled onto the road. The signs everywhere told me we were on the college campus that resembled more of a castle and grounds than a school.

"She'll think you're at your little friends house, won't she? We'll make this fast, you'll be back for dinner."

"Why don't you want her to know, are you scared of her?" I teased. That could have gone two ways. Either he'd get mad, or it would make me like him more. I took the gamble. I wanted to test him too. He laughed again.

"I'm not scared of anyone. That's something I can teach you, if you'd like." People were staring at the car here too. There were professors walking on the lawn and some students who looked to be starting a summer term. I followed him out of the car and onto the grounds, suddenly self conscious of the school uniform I was still wearing.

It felt odd to be walking through the front door in the middle of the afternoon surrounded by hundreds of people. I thought we'd have to slip through an ally and a secret door or something. Weren't there snipers waiting to shoot him if he stepped in front of a camera? I couldn't image how many enemies he had. And places like this college were always watched. They were on the government's surveillance because when lots of smart people get together, sometimes they do stupid things. I realized I'd never looked at a proper picture of Cambridge University before. It seemed more like a castle than a school. And people were wandering around in regular clothes, most of them not even a decade older than I was. They were walking in packs on the walkways laughing with friends,spread out under trees with books and laptops, eating lunch on the lawn. For some reason I'd pictured most of them would be wearing geeky glasses and spent twenty four hours locked in a lab or something.

A sharp whistle directed my attention away from staring at the high castle like towers of the main building we were walking toward. Moriarty was smiling.

"Pretty, isn't it? But don't look too amazed, you're drawing attention to yourself. Low key, remember?" I nodded. The inside of the building was no less impressive than the outside. Everything was huge and looked like it hadn't changed in three hundred years. I followed Moriarty through a maze of hallways, up a lift, down more hallways until we came to one that was lined with lecture classrooms.

"I thought you said we were helping your friend?" I whispered. A lot of the lecture rooms were full with lessons going on.

"We are, why do you think we're in the fancy college?" he asked obviously.

"Your friend is a professor at Cambridge?" He held one of the lecture doors open for me. This one at least was empty besides a man in a nice suit who was writing equations on a blackboard. I was assuming that was the friend. He seemed so caught up in his work, he didn't hear us come in. I didn't recognize the therom he was writing, but it seemed pretty straight forward. I liked math because it was patterns and once I learned the pattern, I could just do it over and over until the pattern stopped and the problem was solved.

"Hello Alex," Moriarty said, clearing his throat. The man turned, surprised to see us standing there.

"What the hell are you doing here?" He looked around and I did too, expecting to see someone else, but we were alone. "Shut that damn door, no one can see you." Moriarty only grinned and walked down to meet him, so I shut the door behind us.

"I thought you wanted my help?" Moriarty asked in fake offense.

"Over the phone! You can't just waltz into my place of work, I've got a position here, an arrangement-" He cut off, his eyes landing on me. As he scanned me, I scanned him back. He was in his late thirties, but that was young to be a professor at a college like this where you had to go to school for a decade.

"Recruiting them rather young, aren't you?" Alex asked like I wasn't standing there. I hated when adults did that. "Who is she?"

"Your salvation," Morarity told him seriously. Then he turned around and smiled at me. "I hope." He gestured for me to come down and I did so hesitantly, not wanting to offend the man who actually owned this lecture hall. I gave me an apologetic look. We were mutually inconvenienced the presence of Moriarty distributing our day.

"Well? Show her your problem," Moriarty instructed. Alex looked at him like this was the most ridiculous suggestion he'd ever heard.

"How old are you?" Alex asked me.

"Show her," Moriarty insisted. "Trust me." I got the feeling that nobody should ever do that. But Alex bit the line, sighing and extending his arm to display the equation. The work he was doing for it was taking up two large sized chalkboards.

"Do you know anything about the Asymptotic theory?" he asked me. He wasn't at all expecting me to nod, never mind give him the correct answer.

"It's used for science. Here you're using it to find the probability of your unknown." I pointed to the original equation. And then you're using the approximation theory to guess the gaps. Is this computer data you're trying to figure out?" Alex stared at me and then back at Moriarty who was smiling.

"Um- yes. I'm designing a sort of code, but it's got bugs. I created this equation to find them, but in my years of trying to crack it, I've gotten lost." He was talking to me like I was ten. I'd been able to guess all that from the numbers. They told a story for themselves. "I was hoping for a fresh set of eyes. Somewhere to see where I'm going wrong."

"Give it go," Moriarty told me. Alex rounded on him.

"You're not serious-"

"Would I have brought her here if I wasn't?" Their bickering started to sound like background noise. The numbers were running through my head and thought it might have been rude to grab chalk and start scribbling on this man's livelihood, I couldn't resist. I'd picked up the pattern, I wanted to finish it. I stepped onto a stool because I was too short to reach the top of the board. Time was nothing when I was working. It could have been two minutes, it could have been twenty. But at some point I realized they'd stopped talking and it was silent. I put the chalk down. There was no where else to go, which meant under my hand was an answer.

"Impossible," Alex muttered. Then he laughed, staring at the result and commuting it was correct. "She did it." Moriarty clapped him on the back, but his eyes were anything but friendly. They were enough to take the gleeful eyes of a mathematician away from his conquest and make him look scared.

"Alex, don't doubt me again." Alex looked at the ground, realizing he was being threatened. And even though the atmosphere in the room had shifted to dangerous, I couldn't resist.

"What does it do?" I asked. "The code you made?"

"Let's go," Moriarty told me. When I didn't move fast enough for his liking, he swooped me off the stool with one arm. "I promised you I'd get you home for dinner. Your welcome, Alex." He started pushing me toward the door when I felt a buzzing in his pocket. He paused, glanced at his phone screen and rolled his eyes. For a terrifying second I thought it was my mum, but I didn't recognize the number.

"I've gotta take this." He walked up the rows of seats, out of earshot.

"What's it do?" I whispered to Alex who was still staring at the solution to his problem in amazement.

"It's just one line of code," he told me. "The hardest code I've ever written. It can tap into any mainframe, connect to any server. It uses satellites, it can access the entire world. It can open any file, any door."

"Really?" I'd read about the ideas for codes like that but they were obviously extremely illegal and nobody was allowed to make them. I hoped this was a long phone call because I wanted Alex to show me the code.

"It was part of a deal," he explained. "I hired him-" he pointed backwards at Moriarty - "I hired him to help me get into this college. They wouldn't accept e, see. Thought I had too much of a criminal background. When I was your age, I used to hack into things I should have left alone. So I hired him to get me this job. But he doesn't take cash. This code was his payment. I'd been working on it for years, but I wouldn't have known what to do with it when it was finished. So I'm giving it to him."

"That's a bad idea," I told him sharply. "Nobody should have a code like that." He smiled at me with that smile adults give children when they think we're stupid.

"He held up his end of the bargain, I'm going to hold up mine. However, you're far too young to be involved with a man like Moriarty . If you have a way out, take it. And if not-" he fished around in his pockets and pulled out a business card, folding it in my palm.

"I could pull some strings. You're young, but if you show them what you can do like you just showed me, it wouldn't be too hard to get you enrolled here."

"I could go to Cambridge?"

"With a mind like yours- darling you could go anywhere." Moriarty was still on the phone, but he was gesturing for me to follow him out. I waved goodbye to Alex, hiding the car in my pocket and followed Moriarty across the lawn to the car which had a cluster of students around it taking pictures.

"No today," he was saying irritably into the phone. "That's what you promised me. Shoo." The students scattered long enough for us to get in. He was paying even less attention to the speed limits while he drove with one hand and continued his call.

"I told you to make the preparations." I played with the card Alex had given me that had his office number on it. "A tall order yes, but one you promised you could give me. I need the identity secured." I started paying more attention to what he was saying, my interest peaking. A second later, he became aware of my presence again and the fact I was listening.

"Keep me updated on your progress. I'm with another client."

"I'm a client?" I asked when he'd hung up. "I thought I worked for you."

"Only if you agree to take the job. It's a hard decision, I know. The choice between me and a big fancy college." I shoved the card inside my pocket as if he hadn't already seen it.

"Do I really have a choice or are you just pretending so I'm not afraid of you?" He grinned.

"Are you?"

"No," I answered instantly, realizing it was true.

"Then maybe you're not as smart as I thought. I'll give you time to think about it. I'm rather busy right now anyway. But soon, I may need your skills so be ready with your answer."

"What are my skills?" It was getting late, but the rush hour traffic was doing little to deter his insane driving. "I mean, why do I have skills? What makes me special?"

"That's a good question, I was wondering the same thing," he mused. "How did you do it, the equation? Explain your process."

"I don't know," I said honestly. "I've read loads of books about math. I liked the patterns. And once I read it, it just-"

"Comes out," he finished. I smiled.

"Yeah." We were home in half the time again. Before dinner, like he promised. Not that my mum ever cooked. If she happened to be home at this time and I was lucky, we'd go to some posh restaurant where none of the menu items were in English and we gambled with which one sounded prettiest. To my surprise, Moriarty got out too.

"You're coming in? I thought we were pretending I went to Jamie's."

"Yeah, I lied. There's one more thing I need you to try for me and it's on your Mummy's phone." My stomach plummeted with anxiety as we walked into the house. My Mum didn't have any rules compared to the parents of the kids I went to school with. But she did have one and it was stay away from my work. It was a part of her life I couldn't be in. And since work was her entire life, the math could be done after that.

"Is that a Lamborghini?" Kate asked, coming to open the door for us. She was the only pretty thing my mum had kept around. I didn't mind her so much anymore. She was chipper, but good at making my hair look good in my school uniform, so she had her uses.

"Oh, hi," she said seeing me walk through the door occupied by a man.

"Is my mum here?" I asked her.

"In the parlor. I'll just go upstairs and disappear then, shall I?" That was the other thing I liked about her. She didn't get in the way. My mum was sitting alone in the giant room shuffling through a pile of what looked like photographs.

"Sorry, didn't call ahead again." Her head shot up at the sound of Moriarty's voice. When she saw me standing beside him, it fell slightly. I moved away from him to sit on the couch next to her just as she was getting up to greet him.

"What trouble do you have for me this time?" she asked in her flirty voice. She threw an envelope over the photographs just as I was leaning in to look at them. "Don't tell me it's my daughter." She gave me a weary look she thought he couldn't see.

"No in fact, she's getting us out of the trouble and hopefully a good deal of effort. You failed to tell me she's a genius."

"I'm not a-" I started defensively but then they both rounded on me and I bit my lip. "I'm not really a genius."

"You underestimate yourself." He wagged his finger at me. "A result of poor parenting, I think. You were hiding her from me miss Adler, why?" My mum didn't usually hesitate in her responses and she didn't normally get serious around men, but she did both of those things now, standing in front of me so I was out of Moriarty's eye line.

"There's no need to mix her up all this, she's far too young. Anything you need I can get you, that was the arrangement."

"I'm altering it." His voice had changed too. There was no more small talk, no banter. "We made a deal to get a result. And she can give it to me."

"I-" my mum started but he was done being patient.

"Show her the code." My mum didn't move. "You know I can just take what I want. Easy way or hard way, it's up to you." Her shoulders fell slightly and then she walked to the safe above the fireplace. That's where she'd been keeping the phone since we got here. After everything that happened at the farm, she realized the phone had to be locked away for it's protection. In the car, I told Moriarty I wasn't afraid of him. I wanted to take that back now. He could get people to do whatever he wanted them to do. That was something to be afraid of. My mum opened the phone and handed it to me.

"See those numbers there?" She pointed to a line of text on an email with a government seal. "That's the code I was telling about. But it's alright if you can't-"

"Of course she can." Moriarty all but pushed my mum out of the way to sit down beside me and put his arm around my shoulders. I wanted to push him off, but this wasn't a game anymore. The fastest way to get him to leave was do what he wanted. I kept my hand tight on the phone in case there was a chance he'd take it.

"Just like the equation," he told me instructively. "Decode that for me." I stared at the numbers. 4c12c45f13e13g60b61f34j64d12h33k34k. They didn't make any sense. There was no pattern and there were letters mixed up in them too. If it was a code, it wasn't one from anything I'd read. Equations were easy, they always had an answer and a way to get to it. This was just random sequences.

"It's alright," my mum told me and it was like having to turn a switch to get myself back to reality. "It's alright, darling."

"Worth a shot," Moriarty said with a casual shrug. "You'll just have to do it the long way round." I could tell it was taking all my mum's strength not to glare at him. "Which I do hope is coming along-"

"I'm gathering what I need," she told him confidently. She seemed more relieved than anything that I couldn't crack her code. "Give me a few more months."  
"You have two." He ruffled my hair as he stood up to leave. "I'll be seeing you again soon, computer monkey. Think about my offer." I didn't say anything and when I heard the door shut behind him, I breathed for the first time in hours.

"Alright? Are you alright?" my mum asked hastily, scanning me for any signs of injury. I shook my head and when she hugged me, I could feel the relief in her relaxing muscles.

"I'm sorry," I said guiltily. "I"m sorry I went with him-"

"No, it's not your fault," she said quickly, smoothing my hair behind my ear. "None of it's your fault, do you hear me?"

"Yeah." I shoved the Cambridge card even farther into my pocket. I knew she'd make me tell her where I went, but I definitely wasn't going to say I was considering Moriarty's offer or Alex's. Ultimately I knew I'd have to choose one. If it really was a choice and after tonight, I didn't think it was. Because it wasn't about deals and arrangements, it was just another bad man who would do anything to get what he wanted. There were far too many of those in the world and my mum and I seemed to meet them all.

"When are you meeting the detective?" I asked as she played with my hair. She did that when she was nervous. "Because he'll be able to solve the code, won't he?"

"First I have to give him a reason to want to meet me," she said cryptically. "But don't worry about any of that. I'm going to take care of it, it's not going involve you anymore."

"But it does. Moriarty wants me to work for him and I can't just say no-"

"I'll take care of it," she repeated. "This detective may be able to help us. Or the people he knows can. Don't worry. Nobody's going to take you away from me." She kissed my hair and I should have just gone with it but for some reason, I had to open my mouth.

"But what if I want to go? It was kind of fun, what we did today. He thinks I do, Mum. He could teach me." She shook her head in an end of discussion way.

"I know you like to think you're smart enough to be an adult Ayza, but you're not. So trust my superior life experience, working for Jim Moriarty is a one way street that you can never leave once you get on. There's so much more this world can offer you." I ran my hand along the side of the card in my pocket and realized she was right. A normal life didn't have to be boring if I was doing something I was good at. Maybe I could even help people.

"Okay."

"Okay," she repeated, smoothing my hair again. A thought crossed my mind from a conversation that seemed to have happened a million years ago. If there was anytime to ask, it was now while she was happy I was safe.

"Mum, Jamie's going away with her parents to an island for the summer. Do you think maybe I could go to?" She laughed lightly, the childishness of the question was funny given what we'd just been talking about.

"And what do her parents and her government working father think of that?"

"I mean, I think they like me. He won't even be there all the time, Jamie said he's going to work for most weeks anyway. If they say yes, can I?"

"That sounds like a great idea. Ask her." I grinned, handed her back the camera phone and ran upstairs to ring Jamie on mine.

 **The next chapter will be finally be the start of ASIB :)**


	5. A Scandal in Belgravia Part 1

**I hope this is good lol. It's easy to write around the episode, but much harder to add my character into pre existing scenes!**

 **Enjoy :)**

She was waiting for me in the parlor when I got home. The house had changed a lot in the two and a half months I was away. They'd painted the walls in the entryway, there was new curtains above the picture windows and all the furniture was white. I was sure there was a reason for all of it, but I didn't get a chance to ask before my mum enveloped me in a hug that made me drop my bags on the new fancy rug.

"There's my beach buddy! Oh, I missed you."

"I missed you too." She was squeezing me really hard, but I was more interested in looking over her. She had the camera phone on the table and she'd been thumbing through it when I came in. It was almost close enough to see the screen. I'd been away a long time, I wanted to know what was going on. She had to be close to getting the detective by now.

"Two months is too long, you're not going away for that long again," she told me sternly and I grinned, forgetting about the phone.

"You went away for six months once and left me with that ancient witch woman."

"She was the neighbor, she used to bake us cookies and let you play with her grandchildren."

"She was a stranger, had a big witch nose and she smelt like cats." She laughed, hugging me again. I could tell she'd missed me. But the truth was, I hadn't really missed her. I wondered if that was wrong. I'd spent the summer running up and down the beach with Jaime, buying lollies on the boardwalk and chasing after boys who only liked you if you were a bathing suit. There'd been nothing to miss about the big old ever changing house and the threat of Americans showing up with guns.

"Well, did you have fun?" My mum pressed, ready for details. "Kate, can you take her bags upstairs?" It wasn't fair for someone to be as pretty as Kate, it really wasn't. She grinned at me as she took my bag which was significantly heavier than when I'd left given that it was packed with sea shells.

"Yeah, it was great. We stayed in a big house and went to the beach a lot."

"I can tell, look at that tan!" I admired that she was trying for once. She actually seemed to have little interest in the phone and was giving it all to me. "And did you get taller?"

"I think I stopped growing a year ago," I informed her with a grin. "How's the case going? Is he coming yet?" She put her hand over the phone and put in her pocket.

"Let's not talk about work, I want to hear about _your_ adventures. How about dinner at that restaurant in the tower you like, the one with the windows on the ceiling?" She liked that place. I'd felt out of place with all the fancy dressed adults and the fact you had to whisper all the time like you were in church.

"Yeah, alright," I agreed. It was amazing how fast the setting of life could change. It seemed like minunes ago I was walking on the boardwalk with Jamie, listing to the seagulls, laughing about silly things like how we'd snuck out the night before to go to a party and then snuck back in the early hours of the morning. And then suddenly as if I'd skipped through space and time, I was sitting in a tower restaurant overlooking greater London across from my mother in the oppressive atmosphere of posh older people in expensive clothes staring at me because I was clearly the youngest person in the building. Or maybe they were staring at my mum because she was clearly the most beautiful and it seemed like such a simple thing to smile politely at your waiter but she made it seem like the actions of a goddess.

"So what did you do? Was it boring?" She pressed her champagne glass to her lips and I watched everyone's heads pivoting on their necks when she smiled, men and woman. I'd have to get used to this again.

"It wasn't boring," I told her truthfully. "There were lots of shops and it was nice when the weather was warm. But the house was huge anyway, they had a pool in their basement."

"Oh, that is fancy." She smiled dazzlingly at the waiter when he poured more champagne in her glass. When she thanked him, she brushed her hand against the back of his arm. The waiter, who couldn't have been any older than twenty, blushed the same shade of scarlet as the table clothes and hurried away.

"What's that face for?" My mum asked me. I wasn't aware I was making a face, but it probably wasn't a good one.

"Can I try some?" I asked, covering up my feelings as usual and pointing to her champagne glass.

"Just a little." She pushed the glass toward me and I sipped it. It was bitter, but felt good going down the back of my throat. "A little," she repeated when I took another sip, glancing around at the other customers who were already staring.

"You've done that before," she accused me. I shrugged, grinning at the table. "Was it champine, or something worse? Come on, you can tell me. I'm the 'cool' mum, remember?" I laughed at the phrase Jamie had once used during her few visits over to our place. It wasn't until I spent a lot of time with the Emersons that I realized my mum could be classified as the cool mum. If cool mum meant letting me do whatever I wanted until I learned to be eternally bored.

"I smoked a cigarette on the boardwalk last month," I admitted, knowing she's just laugh and look almost proud, which she did. "Or a few over multiple nights."

"You're a bad influence on that little sheltered schoolgirl," she accused me.

"It wasn't with Jamie." I knew as soon as I said it that I shouldn't have. She was just going to ask more questions and it was absolutely impossible to talk to my mum about anything to do with the opposite sex ever.

"Was it with a boy?" she asked, catching on immediately. "It was, wasn't it? What's his name?"

"Artie." I took a really big sip of my water to hide my face behind the glass.

"Did you and Artie share cigarettes often in dark alleys alone at night?"

"I didn't say we shared one and I didn't say it was alone at night!" My voice was getting too loud for the quiet tinkling of china and so was her laugh.

"But it was, wasn't it? Did you kiss him?" I shrugged. The truth was, I didn't care about Artie at all. He was my age, boring and had only been with one other girl. I wanted to kiss his older brother and by the end of the summer, we'd done a bit more than kiss. But I wasn't telling my mum any of that. Not because she'd be mad which would be the typical reaction to finding out your fourteen year old daughter hooked up with a nineteen year old universty boy, but because she'd be proud of me for it. So all she got was a shrug and a quick change of topic.

"Morarity said you had two months, so when are we meeting the detective?"

"Soon, it's his move," she told me. "But I don't want you to worry about any of that. When does term start again? If you still want to go."

"I still want to go and tomorrow."

"Don't you need books?"

"Mrs. Emerson bought them for me." When I saw the look at that flashed over her face, I instantly regretted saying it. It was only there for a second, but I saw the jealousy, the guilt. It wasn't that she didn't want to be a normal mum. It's just not how things turned out.

"I really missed you," I followed up immediately. "Two months is a long time. And Artie was a terrible kisser." She laughed lightly and I knew she didn't buy it.

"You don't always have to take care of me, you know. I realize this isn't the ideal situation. But it will be over soon. We can go somewhere far away from the city, just the two of us. Try to have normal lives, how's that sound?"

"Boring," I grinned, pretending to yawn. The story she just told was a fantasy. Even when she was done her job, I wouldn't be done mine. Morariy would still want me to work for him. But at least this time I managed to convince her I didn't care.

The first day of term was supposed to be a fit of confusion. We were the youngest class at the upper school, all my peers had been used to knowing where to go and suddenly we were tiny fish in a huge pond of intimidating older students who shoved you to the sides of the hallways. But instead of running around searching for classes and hiding from pushy bullies, the halls were buzzing with stories of a detective that seemed to have griped the city by it's ears while I'd been away. Sherlock Holmes had been rising through the press like wildfire. There were phones being passed around everywhere with his face and even an odd newspaper clipping. As Jamie and I sat down in our last class of the day, the only one one we had together, I was almost sick of hearing his name.

"The last case he did, that was the big one," Sarah Bermingham informed me, shoving the article I'd seen a million times already across our desks. The headline read _Sherlock Holmes. Net phenomenon._ The tiny picture showed two men hiding their faces from hordes of camera flashes. The one in the front of was the detective with a deerstalker hat pulled over his curly hair that I'd not have been surprised to see a man in his eighties wearing.

"He's cute," Jamie commented. She'd gotten sucked in by it all and had told me at lunch how disappointed he was we were out on an island while things were finally getting interesting around here. "Who's the other guy?"

"That's John Watson, his sidekick," Sarah explained. "He writes the blog. He's a doctor or something." She tossed down another newspaper article with a similar picture and a headline that read _Hatman and Robin: The Web Detectives._ The rest of the class was incredibly dull. The teachers spent the whole time explained how physics made up our entire universe. To cure my boredom, I started thumbing through police reports on my phone. It was a habit I'd picked up on the island since there wasn't enough service to do much of anything else. But police reports, the ones that hadn't' been published yet and were meant only for other policemen's eyes, used different radio waves, not the same ones as mobile phones. They weren't particularly easy to hack into, but that was why it was fun.

Normally the reports themselves weren't that interesting. Drunk uni students, robbery, an occasional domestic homicide. But one of them caught my eye today. A man had gone into the station a few days back claiming that he'd seen a man drop dead while his car had stalled on a back road. A hiker, he said. One second he was standing there perfectly alright and the next, he was lying dead in the field with no explanation. The cause of death was a single blow to the back of the head with a blunt instrument. But the funny thing was, they didn't find the murder weapon. There was nothing around the man that could have done that to him and the witness said he'd seen nobody else who could have whacked him with it. The case was still unsolved. Now that was the kind of thing Sherlock Holmes should be solving. The witness who'd reported the crime was so freaked out, he thought his car backfiring had killed the hiker from meters away. Told the police he was a murder.

And sure enough as I scrolled through the reports, the detective's name came up. He'd been called to the scene earlier that morning, in fact. I wondered if my mum knew. It might be important. But first I wanted to know how it was done. How could the hiker by fine one second and have a serious head injury the next? Where had the murder weapon gone? Sure the witness didn't seem like reliable source, but when the police had turned up they hadn't found anything either. Of course, the witness could be lying, he could have killed the man himself and then gone to the police to cover his tracks. But he didn't seem like the type. After all, the report said he was claiming to think his car backfiring had killed the man which was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard. A sharp nudge on my shoulder brought me out of my trance of ideas. The last bell had rung, students were flooding to the door.

"Come on, my mum's out front," Jamie said, tossing me be my rucksack. "What are you reading?" I quickly switched the screen before she had a good look at it. It happened to be one of the Sherlock Holmes articles I'd been looking at earlier.

"Thought you said it was stupid," she frowned playfully. I had earlier at lunch. I'd wanted people to shut up about it then. Now I was integrated.

"Well maybe it's not," I shrugged. On the car journey back to my house, I kept re reading the facts of the hiker case, trying to find something I'd missed. Maybe he'd already had the head injury and the witness just hadn't seen it until he collapsed. He was at a great distance. But medical reports said the blow would have killed him instantly. There was no time for the witness to have seen him on his feet. It must have happened in a matter of seconds. It was a marsh, maybe the murder weapon had gone downstream before the police got there. They were still searching the banks.

"You're quiet today," Mrs. Emerson observed. I realized I was almost home when I saw the identical white houses that lined my street. "Reading about that detective, are you? I had tea with the neighbor today, she was absolutely buzzing about it."

"Whole school was too," Jamie agreed. We pulled up to the curb outside number forty four and I said goodbye quickly, eager to get inside and tell my mum about what what the detective had been up to today. It was quiet when I went in. Normally there was somebody wandering about. A client or a policeman, a government official, anyone my mum could use for information. Even the maid seemed to have gone home early.

"Mum?" I called up the stairs. I could see that her light was on, so she was home. "Mum, you'll never believe the police report I found." She was sitting in front of her vanity and Kate was doing her makeup as was the custom before a client arrived. The odd thing was there was half a dozen dresses spread messily across the bed like some kind of fashion show run up.

"The hiker and the car, I heard," she told me. I noticed a police hat sitting left bed. That was how she got her information.

"Who's coming over?" I asked, putting the hat on. It dipped into my eyes and made Kate laugh.

"Our friend is sending me a treat." I peered at her from the inside of the hat's lining. She whole body seemed to be buzzing. She was gripping the sides of her chair so tight her knuckles had turned white and her fingers were fidgeting.

"He's coming here now?!" I exclaimed. My stomach squirmed with nervous excitement. He'd know how it was done, he'd probably already solved the hiker case.

"Shh, my god let the whole street know," Kate said, nodding at the open windows. My mum pushed her away, glancing out the window. I looked too, but I didn't see anyone.

"Have the Emerson's gone?" She asked me.

"Yeah, they're gone. I'm staying," I said firmly. That was her one rule. I couldn't be in the house when she was working. But this time it was different. Normally it was bad guys, people who were dangerous. A detective and a doctor weren't murders or creeps, so this time I could stay.

"Fine, help me then. Which dress," she instructed pointing to the messy pile. I held up the first one I saw, not really caring about any of them.

"Silver one." The next fifteen minunes consisted of my mum trying on different dresses that Kate and I both told her she looked perfect in, but she didn't like. I'd neverseen my mum nervous about meeting a man before. Well, maybe not nervous, but she did care more. She wanted to get it right.

"The problem is anything you were you can dissect, right?" I asked once the pile of clothes started to reach the top of my head. "So just don't wear anything." She paused for a moment and then a huge grin spread over her face.

"Ayza, has anyone ever told you you're a genius?" She pecked my cheek and ran into her closet.

"Mum, I was joking!" I shouted after her, but she was already slamming the door. Kate was biting her tongue and quickly busied herself with picking up the discarded dresses.

"Take off that school uniform and hide it," my mum ordered from the other side of the door. "Wear something that makes you look innocent!"

"I am innocent!" I teased. Her happiness had always been infexious for me. Probably because she spent so much time worrying.

"Ditch the police hat," Kate said, swiping it off and hiding it under the bed. I stuck out my tongue at her, running to my room to change. ( cgi/set?id=216094802) I was throwing my discarded school uniform on my bed just as I heard the doorbell ring. Kate was already standing by the door, ready to open it.

"You take the doctor, I've got the detective," she said.

"No, no fair!"

"Hey, your mum's orders. She held her finger to her lips, silencing my further protests as she pressed the call button. I leaned on her shoulder so I could see the viewer. And there stood Sherlock Holmes, the detective with the funny hat from the news articles. But he wasn't wearing the funny hat now. He had on normal people clothes and what looked like a priest cuff on his collar and he was clearly trying very hard to pretend to cry.

"Hello?" He was standing much too close to the camera. He had what looked like some real cuts on his face and he made his voice all shaky and scared sounding when he answered.

"Oo- uh, sorry to disturb you. I've just been attacked" Was this the best way the brilliant consulting detective could think of to break into a house? As if we didn't already know he was coming. I wondered how much he knew about my mum. She knew everything about him. I never got to watch her play with people, this might be fun. But more than anything I wanted to ask him about the hiker. THe case was unsolved. I wanted an ending.

"They took my wallet and my phone. Please can you help me?"  
"I can phone the police if you want," Kate offered. She glanced at me, sniffling laughter at the childish attempt at a theater show. He might as well have rung the door claiming to be a little girl selling cookies.

"Thank you, thank you. Would I mind if I waited here- just until they come? Thank you so much." Kate hit the button to open the door. With a rag on his face and fake tears in his eyes, Sherlock Holmes walked into our house followed closely by his sidekick, army doctor John Watson. Was this the best the government had to offer to protect the dignity of one of its royals? Seriously? Kate and I stood against the mantel so they could walk in.

"I saw it all happen, don't worry I'm a doctor," John told us. "Have you got a first aide kit?"  
"In the kitchen, I'll show you," I offered. Kate showed the pretend priest into the parlor. John Watson followed me to the opposite end of the house. He had a heavy, even step like he was still marching to war. I lead him into the kitchen and he raised his eyebrows a bit, observing how fancy everything was. I dug through the cupboard until I found the tiny box that probably didn't contain anything more than bandaids.

"Is this good?" I asked innocently.

"Yes, thank you." He looked at me, trying to figure out who I was. He'd feel guilty if I got mixed up into anything that may or may not be happening in the parlor.

"Uh- how old are you if you don't mind me asking?" I threw some of the stuff in a bowl and handed it to him. I wanted to end this conversation as quickly as possible and get to wear the action was.

"Fourteen," I said honestly. "You coming back?" I had already started to walk toward the parlor. I went around the cornor first, settling against the wall so I could watch the doctor's face when he looked up.

"Right this should do it-" He stopped short upon seeing my mum completely naked standing in the middle of the room with Sherlock's priest tag in her mouth. "I've missed something, haven't I?"

"Please, sit down," my mum offered him. He didn't move. Sherlock was now looking at me. I smiled back at him. Now he looked like the proper detective with his eyes scanning like a virus doe a hard drive. I wondered what he could see. Probably more than teenage girl with too curly black hair and skin too pale to fit the color. Unlike John Watson, he also likely didn't see my age as his first assessment, but rather the way I met his eyes without hesitation and found this situation perfectly normal.

"Or if you'd like some tea, I can call the maid."

"I had some at the palace," Sherlock told her. He'd dropped his oh my god I've just been attacked scared voice. Now it was cold and calculating. My mum sat down on the sofa across from him, making no attempts to cover herself. No way for him to read like he did me. I guessed it was kind of a smart idea.

"I know."

"Clearly." His eyes scanned her, but not in the way a normal man's would. His were like a computer scanning for a break in a firewall. He did the same thing to me, but faster. I wondered what that meant. Was I easy to read or hard? He was hard for me to read. He didn't make normal body movements. John Watson on the other end was shuffling his feet, clearly uncomfortable and he was unhappy that he seemed to be the only one confused by the situation. He was easy to read. I liked those people better. They were predictable.

"I had tea too at the palace. If anyone's interested." He seemed keen to break the long look between the detective and my mum.

"Do you know the big problem with a disguise, Mr. Holmes?" My mum asked me. He raised his eyebrows, interested. "However hard you try, it's always a self portrait." I giggled, leaning against the doorframe.

"You think I'm a vigar with a bleeding face?" The detective asked.  
"No, I think your damaged, delusional and believe in a higher power. In your case, it's yourself." She leaned forward, looking at the cut on his cheek. "Somebody loves you. If I had to punch that face, I'd avoid your nose and teeth too." I looked at John. He let out a short laugh.

"Uh, could you put something on please?" He held out the bandage I'd put in the bowl for him. "Anything at all? Napkin?"

"Why? Are you feeling exposed?" Ironic since she was the one not wearing clothes. Sherlock stood up, holding out his coat for her.

"I don't think John knows where to look." My mum walked past it so she was standing right in front of John. I moved further into the room to take her seat and get a better view of Sherlock. I wanted to be in his line of sight when I asked about the hiker. I wanted to see if he was surprised I had that information. I wanted his attention, though I wasn't sure why it mattered so much to me.

"Oh, I think he knows exactly where. Not sure about you." She took the coat finally and put it over her shoulders. Time to play a new game. "Never mind. We've got better things to talk about." She sat down next to me and opened her mouth to say something else, but I cut her off.

"So how'd he do it?" I asked the detective. Three pairs of eyes turned to me. He didn't get it from my clue, so I gave him more. " The hiker with the bashed in head?"

"That's not why I'm here." His voice was steady, but the crease on his forehead gave it away. No, he couldn't read me. He was seeing the teenage girl just like all the others did. He was surprised by the question and the knowledge that I'd somehow acquired.

"No, you're here for the photographs, but that's never going to happen," my mum told him. She handed me her heels and I threw them over the side of the couch. John had to step out of the way to avoid being hit with them.

"Yeah, and since we're here just chatting anyways," I said eagerly. My mum was making an impatient face that only I could tell was there. She didn't care about the hiker or the case, only the seducing and getting what she wanted from him. But I was helping her, he wasn't going to be interested if she was just batting her eyes and acting smart.

"That's not been on the news yet so how do you-" John started, but my mum cut him off.  
"I know one of the policemen. Or I know what he likes." No, I hacked into government police files, she knew that. She was making it seem like I'd just overheard it in the hall or something. But Sherlock seemed to catch onto this because he was still looking at me, not her. John sat down on her other side. Unlike the detective, he'd been drawn in already.

"Oh. And you like policemen?" Boring. I wanted to get back to the case.

"I like detective stories. And detectives. Brainy's the new sexy." Really? She was going to play with him now? He wasn't even that handsome. He was just sort of ordinary looking.

"Position of the car," Sherlock stuttered. Never mind, she did catch him. He only got defensive when she went after John cause he got jealous. "Position of the car relative to the hiker at the time of the backfire. That and the fact that the deathblow was to the back of the head. That's all you need to know." He started pacing in front of me. Oh, so it was a game. A test.

"So how was he murdered?" I asked.

"He wasn't."

"You don't think he was murdered?" I asked. My head was swimming with any other possibilities it could be, but I couldn't come up with any.

"I know it wasn't," he corrected.

"How?" I asked.

"The same way that I know that the victim was an excellent sportsmen recently returned from foreign travel and that the photographs are somewhere in this room." That's why he was pacing, he was using the game to buy time while he looked for what he was really after.

"Okay, but how?" I asked. My mum nudged me violently.

"Oh, so they are in this room, thank you." My stomach dropped. He didn't think I was interesting at all, he was just using me because I was the weakest link. And I fell for it.

"John, man the door. Don't let anyone in." Sherlock winked at me. I glared back. John left to guard the door. I thought my mum would be angry, I'd just ruined the entire game, but her hand was passing over mine in a silent message to keep going. She'd caught onto my idea. Keep him interested in the case, buy more time.

"Alright, you want to know?" Sherlock asked me. I nodded. "Two men alone in the countryside and one car."

"I thought you were looking for the photo's now?" My mum asked in fake confusion.

"No, looking takes ages. I'm just going to find them." He was pacing in front of the mirror the safe was behind, but he didn't know they were there yet. The mirror just let him look at all of the room. "But your daughter is moderately clever and we've got a moment, so let's pass the time. Two men, a car, nobody driver's trying to fix his engine. He's getting nowhere. And the hiker's taking a moment, looking at the sky. Any moment now something's going to happen. What?"

"The hiker's going to die," I answered.

"No, that's the result." There was a patient tone in his voice I had a feeling he didn't offer many people. "What's going to happen?"

"The car's going to backfire," my mum said a second before I could. It was her turn now. I'd roped him in, now I had to let her pull. Sherlock nodded.

"And what's that do?"

"It makes a loud noise. But so what?" I asked.

"Oh, noises are important," he instructed. "Noises can telling you everything. For instance-" The smoke alarm started to scream the end of his sentence. Apparently John wasn't just watching the door.

"Thank you." I looked at Sherlock again. He was looking at the mirror. "Upon hearing a smoke alarm, a mother would look toward her child." My mum was looking at the mirror, at the phone. Not at me, the child sitting next to her. I suddenly felt very cold. That had been a test too. He was gaging our relationship, he was scanning her.

"Amazing how fire exposes our priorities." It only took him a second to find the switch under the top of the mantle the at made the mirror go up revealing the safe. My mum stood. I didn't. She cared more about that phone than me. She'd always cared more about her cases than me. I knew that, so why did it make me feel like this? The only reason I was in here is because she thought Sherlock would like me if the naked thing wasn't enough, and he had. I'd been like her plan B. Just like I was her plan B to protect when there was danger.

"Alright John, you can turn it off now," Sherlock called. A few moments later, the alarm clicked off. But there was an odd noise when it did, louder than it being hit with something. My mum and the detective didn't seem to notice. He was leaning over the safe, explaining the keypad My mum was smirking because she knew this was as far as he could get. Even I didn't know the code to the safe.

"You should always use gloves with these things," Sherlock scolded her. I didn't move from my position on the couch. Images of last nights dinner kept coming back. When she'd acted like she cared. But work would always be more important, so why had I pretend otherwise?

'The strongest oil deposits always on the first key used, that's quite clearly a three, but after that the sequences is almost impossible to read." I perked up a little. That was kind of interesting. I wondered if she'd thought of that. "I'd say from the make that it's a six digit code. Can't be your birthday, no disrespect but you were clearly born in the eighties. The eight's barely used so-"

"I'll tell you the code right now." She'd started pacing around him and he didn't notice because he was so busy looking at the keypad. "You know what, I already have. Think," she teased. The door burst open with more force than would have been natural for John's return. The first thing I saw was the front of a gun with a silencer on the end. The sharp noise I'd heard when the alarm went off. Three men flooded into the room leading John with his hand behind his head. And the one in the front, I recognized.

"Hands behind your head, on the floor, keep it still," he said calmly. It was the American from the old house, the one who killed Billy.

"Sorry Sherlock," John muttered as he was forced to his knees. A man came up behind me and pushed me down too.

"Miss Adler, on the floor," the American ordered. She was pushed own on my other side, her eyes on me this time. A bit late for that, wasn't it? The phone was more important, she might as well worry about that.

"Did you want me on the floor too?" Sherlock had his hands behind his head but in a loose way as if this was all a joke. The three men were pointing guns at each of our heads and I could feel mine brushing the back of my neck.

"No sir, I want you to open the safe," the American ordered.

"American, interesting," Sherlock noted, looking toward my mum. "Why would you care?"

"Sir the safe. Now, please."

"I don't know the code," Sherlock said as calmly as if he was being called upon in class and decided to give the teacher an attitude.

"We've been listening. She said she told you." My mum brushed her shoulder against mine in an action that I guessed was supposed to be comforting. But I was mad at her, I didn't want her comfort. In fact, the anger was preventing me from feeling very nervous at all about the gun on my head. Or maybe that was the adrenaline.

"Well, if you'd been listening, you'll know that she didn't."

"I'm assuming I missed something. From your reputation, I'm assuming you didn't, Mr. Holmes." The American was getting more and more agitated. He'd shot a boy, he wouldn't care about shooting the rest of us. But Sherlock was still acting like everything was under control.

"For god sakes, she's the one who knows the code, ask her!" John said angrily.

"Yes sir, she also knows the code that automatically calls the police and sets off the burglar alarm, I've learned not to trust this woman." Probably a good idea. I wondered if I got a hold of one of these guns if I could really do it. If I could really shoot that American through his skinny little head for what he did to Billy. I wanted to do it. But would I still when I was pointing a gun at him?

"Mr. Holmes doesn't know-" my mum started but was quickly cut off.

"Shut up," the American hissed. "One more word out of you- just one- and I will decorate that wall with the inside of your daughter's head. After what happened to my men a few months ago, that for me will not be a hardship."

"Are you insane, she's a kid!" John shouted. Sherlock's face had changed too. It was no longer a game, now he looked ready for a fight.

"Mr. Archer," the American ordered. "On the count of three, shoot Doctor Watson."

"What?" John demanded, suddenly finding himself a target. He shouldn't have defended me, the people who spoke were the ones who got shot in these situations.

"I don't know the code," Sherlock insisted. John's head was being forced down to the level of my knees.

"One," the American called.

"I don't know the code," Sherlock said, still calm.

"Two."

"She didn't tell me, I don't know it!" His resolve was starting to crumble. Was I seriously about to have a man's brain stem all over my skirt?

"I'm prepare to believe you any second now. Three." I shut my eyes, bracing for impact.

"No, stop!" Sherlock ordered. The American waited. Sherlock turned toward the mirror, started at the buttons for a few seconds, then started pressing them. I heard a lock click. He'd figured it out, somehow he'd done it. He paused before opening the door and then turned to face the rest of us.

"Vatican Cameos." John ducked, so I did too, figuring it was some kind of code. Sure enough, something went flying over our head and impaled itself into the man who was about to shoot John. The man behind me went to move to defend the lead American guy who Sherlock was hitting in the head with the back of his gun. I held out my foot and tripped him and he fell face forward onto the carpet. John grabbed his head and whacked him on top of the head with it. There was one man left standing and my mum had a gun pointed at his head.

"Do you mind?" Sherlock asked.

"Not at all," she answered, hitting him with the bunt of the gun so all four of them were lying unconscious on the carpet. Well, three of them were. The fourth guy was definitely dead, impaled through the eye socket by some kind of spear that had flown out of the safe.

"Are you alright?" It wasn't my mum who bent down to check on me, but doctor John Watson. I nodded, wiping some hair out of my face. When I pulled my hand away, it was wet. The dead man's blood had splattered on me.

"He's dead," John informed us after quickly checking the guy's pulse.

"Thank you," my mum proclaimed, just slightly out of breath and still holding the gun. "You were very observant." She wasn't talking to John anymore, but he didn't get the hint.

"Observant?" he asked. My mum smirked at Sherock.

"I'm flattered."

"Don't be," he told her. He had a gun too and was already in motion, running toward the door. "They'll be more of them. They'll be keeping an eye on the building." The detective and the doctor disappeared around the door. I looked in the open safe and realized it was empty, he'd taken the phone. My mum ran to check it and I grabbed the discarded gun that had been previously pointed at my head. She wasn't watching me of course, because she was more worried about the phone. It would be so easy. I wouldn't even have to look in the American's eyes while I killed him. I could pretend he was sleeping.

"Ayza, what are you doing?" Finally I had her attention. I was standing over the unconscious American leader, my gun pointed at the back of his head.

"He killed Billy," I reminded her. "And if we don't' kill him now, he's gonna keep coming after us."

"So we'll keep running." Her voice sounded funny. Almost like she was afraid of me. "Put it down, you can't kill him."

"You'd do it," I hissed t her. "You've done it before. You poisoned that one man when you were done with him, remember? They took his body out on a stretcher past my bedroom while you pretend to cry. You thought I was asleep, but I wasn't."

"Darling, give me the gun," she said slowly. "It's alright. Just give it to me." There were five loud shots from outside that caught my attention long enough for her to yank it from my hands. And then there were footsteps, Sherlock and John coming back.

"Check the rest of the house, see how they got in," Sherlock was ordering. He stopped in the middle of the parlor, obvious to what had happened.

"Well." There was a flash of back in his hand as he tossed the phone playfully. "That's the knighthood in the bag."

"Ah. And that's mine." My mum held out her hand for the phone. Her voice was shaking a little. I bet he noticed it, but he thought it was because of him, not because she'd just stopped me from killing the unconscious man lying at my feet.

"All the photographs are on here, I presume?" Sherlock asked. He was looking at the home screen which showed it was locked.

"Ayza, go make sure our doctor friend doesn't get lost," my mum told me. I was more than eager to get away from her. I felt oddly numb as I walked up the stairs toward where I could hear footsteps. Almost like I was floating. I found him in my mum's room kneeling over a body. It was Kate's. She was lying face down on the floor in front of the open balcony window where the American's had obviously gotten in. And suddenly I could feel my body again. My stomach sunk with anxiety.

"Is she dead?" John's head shot up, he hadn't heard me come up the stairs.

"No, she's just unconscious" he assured me. I let out a loud breath of relief. "You sure you're alright? Do you need to sit?" He gestured toward the bed, but I shook my head and backed away before he could put a guiding hand on my arm.

"No." He stared at me for a moment and in the mirror, I caught a look at my reflection. I looked even paler than normal and there was a streak of blood running down the left side of my face. I wiped it off with my sleeve. My hands weren't shaking, I wasn't in shock. The doctor noticed this too and his face got even more considered.

"Sherlock," he shouted over me. A second later light footsteps were bounding up the stairs followed by my mums slower ones.

"Must have come in this way," he pointed out the window. "It's alright, she's just out cold," he assured my mum.

"Well god knows she's used to that. There's a back door. Better check it, Doctor Watson. Ayza, show him where it is." I knew what she was about to do. She was going to get that camera back because our lives depended on it. The backdoor was bolted, they hadn't gotten in this way.

"Nope, that's sealed," John observed helpfully. I could hear police sirens in the distance. This would have to be fast. I opened the door, causing John to pause like I knew it would.

"Uh, where are you going?"

"To bring the car around," I said truthfully. "Don't worry, you're friend will be fine, she doesn't normally kill them."

"Wait, what does that mean? Hey-" he grabbed my wrist so I had to stop and look at him. "Don't just run off, do you need help? Is there someone else I can phone who will-" I shook his arm off.

"You're nice, Doctor Watson. There aren't many men like you. But you can't help me." I started walking away from him and he called after me again.

"You didn't even tell me your name!" I saw no harm in it. He'd find out soon anyway and I meant what I said, he was nice.

"It's Ayza!" I called back. And then I went around the cornor and he was gone. I found the car that kate always parked on the curb. I didn't have keys, but I'd read in a book that if you pry off the panel by the steering wheel and press two wires together, the car would start. More sparks flew out than I was accepting and they burnt my fingertips. I winced in pain, but the car roared to life. I'd driven cars before, once when I was barely old enough to reach the peddles one of my mum's temporary friends had thought it would be fun to teach a kid to drive. I pulled the car around the front of the house, got in the passenger's side and waited. It only took her a few minunes. She was still dressed only in the detective's coat and cradling the phone to her chest. A second later we were pulling away from the house that had been our home for the past six months and I knew we wouldn't be going back. A thought occurred to me when we reached the end of the block. We were leaving this house like we'd left all the places we stayed throughout my life. Without our things and in a hurry, there was nothing unusual about that. But I was leaving more than just the house behind.

"What?" My mum asked, reading the expression on my face. "What, baby?"

"My school uniform," I remembered. "I left it on the bed." It took her a second to figure out why that was of concern. But once she did, she didn't seem to care.

"I told you to hide it."

"I forgot."

"You can't go back to the school, I'm sorry, she said quickly, not sorry at all. I wanted to protest, but there was nothing I could say. We were pulling onto the motorway , leaving greater London behind and headed south. I knew I couldn't go back and the fact I was this considered about it was stupid and childish. It was just a school, just a game I'd been playing. Suddenly I saw a flash of the beach that yesterday morning, I'd been standing on. It seemed like a year ago. And Jamie, her pretty face laughing at a seagull and her mum making us sandwiches inside the pretty house and I felt like just for a moment, I was safe. I didn't have to look over my shoulder, there'd be no men with guns. And then I was back in the car and it was gone. And I'd never be able to see her again.

 **I'm splitting the episode into multiple chapters since it takes place over the course of many months. Look forward to more teenage angst and chats with Moriarty in the next chapter!**


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